Mark Chiusano

If you work in Manhattan and have the gift/luxury of a lunch break, you’ve probably used a POPS without knowing it.

POPS, or privately owned public spaces, can be sunny or shaded plazas or sitting areas in indoor atriums, where you can enjoy your sandwich away from the desk.

At worst, these POPS are barren, vacant lobbies, or simply (and illegally) inaccessible.

Why does that matter beyond the fact that you can’t find a place to nibble your sandwich? Because there’s no such thing as a free POPS: each one was set aside for the public by property owners or developers in exchange for building bigger or taller towers and thus renting out more commercial space.

A new City Council effort aiming to get developers to stick to their end of the bargain has a particularly juicy case study: Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which was able to build taller in exchange for setting aside public spaces.

The public part of Trump Tower has received significant attention since Trump descended the escalator in June 2015 to announce his presidential run.

DCAS is in the process of revamping the review process to include more public review. Right now, the main notification is a brief appearance in the City Record, which you can view here for some light reading.

A fix is necessary to stop those looking to make a killing on land, that most precious NYC quantity. Besides profits there are a few other things we need in NYC — truly plentiful and affordable housing, schools and homeless shelters, as Councilmember Ben Kallos noted at Friday’s hearing.

It would be a shame for none of those needs to be addressed on plots that were intended to be preserved.

But those are the current rules of the game.