Michael Stern

Every building I have worked on began as a site that did not obviously permit one. A core that would not fit inside the footprint. A designated structure already standing where the tower needed to go. A neighboring owner holding the floor area that made the whole thing viable.

I started JDS Development Group in 2002 and I am its chief executive officer. We work in New York City and Miami. The part of this business I find genuinely interesting happens long before a foundation is poured, while the constraints on a piece of ground are still being read and the building is still an argument about what that ground will allow.

That argument is usually settled by four things: geometry, code, structure, and whatever law is already attached to the land. Capital and taste decide much less than people outside the business assume. A site with a narrow frontage and a landmark on it will produce a particular building no matter who is paying for it, and the work is figuring out which particular building that is.

What follows on this site is the technical account of that work. How a tower gets built in a courtyard. What preservation review actually reaches and what it leaves alone. How two towers can be joined in the air without the connection tearing itself apart. What a building made for equipment will and will not give you once it has to hold people.

I write as someone who has had to solve these problems on real sites, with real engineers, and who has accepted compromises on some of them. Where a subject crosses into structural engineering, code or land use law, I will explain the mechanism and then say plainly who you would actually retain.

Where the writing is

He publishes about nine pieces a week under his own name, and none of the argument lives on this site, which documents the buildings instead. The channels are below with whatever went out most recently on each.

• Long form essays on how these buildings were solvedOne piece at a time, at length, with the reasoning intact.
  1. What Preservation Review Governs and What It Leaves Open
  2. Why Two Adjacent Parcels Are Worth More Than Their Sum
  3. The Case for Buying Development Rights You Cannot Yet Use
  4. How a Zoning Lot Merger Changes What a Site Holds
• Shorter pieces, one constraint at a timeA single mechanism per post, on the site that carries his name.
  1. Why a Narrow Lot Decides Where the Windows Go
  2. What a Through Block Site Changes About the Building
  3. An Easement Can Shape a Tower More Than a Zoning Line
  4. Why Unused Floor Area Hides on the Lowest Buildings
• Mechanism by mechanism, written to be searchedThe same subjects, structured for somebody arriving from a search.
  1. Party Wall Rights Fix the Edge of a New Building
  2. What a Sending Lot Gives Up When Its Floor Area Moves
  3. Development Rights Transfers Live in the Public Record
  4. Why Floor Area Moves Only Between Lots That Touch
• Press profile and the subjects he coversFor anyone approaching him in a press capacity.
• The firm record on CrunchbaseJDS Development Group as an organisation.
• Professional profile on LinkedInCareer record and the firm.
• JDS Development Group, the firm's own siteProjects, people and current work.