In New York you can buy the air above your neighbour’s building. On a trip I heard it as a curiosity; turns out it’s a whole market, with prices per square foot.
They’re called air rights. Zoning gives every lot a maximum buildable floor area (the FAR, floor area ratio). If the building on it is shorter than allowed, the unused floors can be sold to an adjacent lot, usually through a zoning lot merger (the lots must share at least 10 feet of frontage and sit in the same zoning district). Transferable development rights can move them further in some cases.
Mostly people buy air to build taller. But you can also buy it so that nobody builds at all.
In 2016 the owners of an 11-loft building in Chelsea paid developer Extell 11 million dollars for about 19,500 square feet of rights, over 560 dollars per square foot, so that a tower across the street wouldn’t block their view of the Empire State. For scale: in 2023 a Citadel, Vornado and Rudin deal bought air from St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 312.50 dollars per square foot.
Paying to keep the sky empty. Very Manhattan.