AI is a Prophet But it’s Not Stagnations Messiah - Air Rights Roll Back The Rock
The Hidden Billions Above Your Roof
Promises Made - Promises Not Kept
In the 1960’s, Popular Science promised flying cars by 1985. In the 2000s, Larry Page funded an electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicle startup. In 2016, Uber announced its air taxi initiative. And in 2025, most Americans still spend over an hour a day in traffic, waiting for innovation that has yet to arrive.
It’s not for lack of technology. The prototypes exist. The engineering works. The cost curves are improving. What’s missing is something more foundational, something that makes all growth possible.
For drones, flying taxis, 5G densification, AI data demand, and rooftop vertiports to scale, we need a way to unlock the underutilized third dimension: airspace just above the built environment. Not national airspace, but the first 400 feet, the “low-altitude” volume that remains legally tethered to surface property.
This layer is the most mispriced, misunderstood, and misallocated resource in modern cities. And until we fix that, every trillion-dollar drone projection is just another PowerPoint fantasy with toys.
Back to the Future and Broken Timeline
In Back to the Future Part II, released in 1989, Marty McFly rockets forward in time to the year 2015. He arrives in a world teeming with flying cars, hoverboards, weather control, fusion reactors, and biometric smart homes. It’s sleek, vertical, and frictionless. Every surface hums with kinetic energy. The future, as imagined by the 1980s, looked a lot like magic.
Back to the Future was a time machine in another sense: it channelled the 1950s’ deep-seated optimism. That golden era believed in atomic utopias and suburban abundance, in a world where each decade would leapfrog the last. Zemeckis and Spielberg wrapped the ambitions of two eras into one film. The result was a future built not only on microchips, but on confidence.
2015 arrived, no flying cars, no Mr. Fusion, no hoverboards that hover. The only thing that arrived on time was the self-lacing sneakers, and even those were a tribute, not a revolution.
We missed the deadline and slowed down to take a detour.
The Jet Age vs. The App Store
The 1950s viewed the future vertically. The 1980s still believed. But somewhere between Netscape and TikTok, we flattened the curve, not the epidemiological one, the ambition curve. Software has eaten the world, but it forgot to feed the parts that fly, build, and move.
Back to the Future Part II imagined 2015 with:
Skyways full of flying cars (regulated traffic lanes at altitude)
Fusion energy from household reactors running on garbage
Hoverboards for teenagers and robotic dog-walkers for suburbanites
Real-time weather control
Multi-screen video calling with biometric access control
Instead, the real 2015 gave us:
Uber, not flying cars
Alexa, not artificial intelligence
Instagram filters, not weather control
Meal kits, not food hydrators
Surveillance capitalism, not cybernetic peace.
Where the movie imagined applied physics, we delivered social media. Ten years on, has much changed? Some tweaks, but it all looks very much like linear progression.
The Myth of Aviation Progress
Commercial aviation, once a symbol of modernity, has barely budged in a generation. Since the retirement of Concorde in 2003, no civilian aircraft has flown faster than Mach 0.85. Concorde itself first flew in 1969, carried passengers at twice the speed of sound, and connected New York to London in 3.5 hours.
I still remember chasing out of the house to hear the sonic boom overhead in Co. Kerry, Ireland, at approximately 11:12 when I was on vacation, if the winds were right. Two decades after its final flight, no successor has emerged.
Dozens of supersonic projects have been announced, like Boom, Aerion, Spike, and Hermeus, but none have flown passengers. Aerion shut down in 2021. Boom is years behind schedule, but we remain hopeful. NASA’s X-59 is experimental, not commercial.
Flight times remain flat. A transatlantic route in the 1970s took roughly 7 hours. It still does. Even domestic routes are slower due to increased taxi times, congestion, and outdated routing. Not to get started on security gates and the farce of removing shoes, belts and our dignity. While software eats the world, aviation has been trapped in the 1970s, optimized at the margins but frozen in form.
Fuel efficiency has improved modestly. A Boeing 787 is roughly 25% more efficient than a 767 from the 1980s, but it flies no faster and lands at the same inefficient gates. Aircraft design today is governed by a culture of risk aversion, regulatory friction, and legacy infrastructure. The FAA’s certification timelines have doubled since the 1970s. Manufacturers focus on refining existing models, rather than creating bold new ones.
Non-military urban air mobility, eVTOLs, drones, and air taxis have been “five years away” for over a decade. Billions have been raised, but nothing has been deployed at scale. What these delays reveal isn’t a lack of ingenuity; it’s a lack of legal permission and clear access to private physical space. The problem isn’t how to fly. It’s where, and with whose consent, it’s air rights.
Real aviation progress now demands what software alone can’t provide, which is a system of usable air rights. Without that, we don’t get a new mobility layer, we get more press releases and more gridlock. Supersonic didn’t die from physics. It died from institutional decay and NIMBYs.
Stagnation by the Numbers
Urban Congestion: The U.S. economy loses over $81 billion annually to traffic delays. In L.A., the average driver spent 89 hours stuck in traffic last year. These are deadweight losses imposed by outdated infrastructure and two-dimensional thinking.
Fatalities: Over 40,000 Americans die in traffic accidents annually. Globally, it’s 1.3 million deaths per year. Many of these are on short-haul routes that could be displaced by autonomous drones or eVTOLs. Flying vehicles won’t just be faster, they’ll be safer.
Air Taxi Delays: Joby, Archer et al, are all years behind optimistic launch timelines. Uber sold off its Elevate division. FAA approvals are glacial. The problem isn’t the aircraft. It’s decentralized physical infrastructure. Where do you land? Where do you fly? How do private air rights owners give permission?
Housing Paralysis: Since the 1980s, U.S. homebuilding per capita has declined by over 50%. In New York, only 4.7% of the city’s land is zoned for multifamily housing. The ‘City of Yes’ rezoning aims to reverse this by legalizing more height using air rights, and mixed-use, but political opposition tries to slow it.
Real Estate as Dead Capital: Across the U.S., over $20 trillion of property value is locked up in underbuilt air rights parcels. In high-demand cities like San Francisco and Boston, entire districts remain height-restricted even as homelessness surges and rents spike. Unused air rights in Cambridge are, by some estimates, worth $12 billion.
We are living through a systemic failure to grow caused not by technical constraints, but by inertia.
The Densification Mandate
The 21st must be about density. Not just horizontal density, but also vertical reuse of the cityscape.
In New York, the 'City of Yes' rezoning will enable the construction of tens of thousands of new homes by removing outdated floor-area restrictions. There's free money, and it's not from a COVID-19 helicopter this time. In London, homeowners can now add one or two stories to their houses without a full planning inquiry. An instant market that requires the parties to be brought together.
In Australia, New South Wales overtook Victoria in new housing starts for the first time in a decade, 24,716 approvals in a single year, driven by air rights incentives like height bonuses for affordable units.
These are glimpses of what a developing air rights regime unlocks.
Today, the market is fragmented. Pricing is opaque. Ownership is unclear. Most property owners are unaware that they own a valuable vertical slice. It’s hidden in plain sight. What if that painting in your grandma’s room was a Caravaggio, but nobody knew?
We don’t run a telecom spectrum market like this for good reason.
From Broken Promises to Physical Permissioning
Drones and eVTOLs are functionally ready. The FAA has issued vertiport standards. Drone delivery pilot programs are underway in Utah, Texas, Florida, and other locations, with Walmart flying naked in over 20 locations. The path to scale isn’t blocked by aerodynamics but by local consent. The social licence.
A drone crossing your backyard without permission is trespassing. A vertiport on your building or land requires access rights. Telecom antennas need rooftop leases. We’re still pretending the air is public when every court ruling for over a century has affirmed that landowners own the low-altitude sky.
Markets need clarity. Operators need access. Owners need incentives. That’s what property rights and a market do: they coordinate. They enable voluntary exchange where regulation alone would stall.
We’ve seen this before. In the 1990s, spectrum auctions unlocked billions of dollars in value by assigning tradable rights to previously unregulated radio bands. Wi-Fi, 4G, and satellite broadband followed. The same logic applies to air rights today. Structure the market, and innovation follows. In this case, the private air rights owner holds the whip hand.
The Rooftop Renaissance
In the telecom industry, rooftop access is everything. As mobile data doubles every 24 months, the only path to scale is higher node density. In Manhattan, small section rooftop leases can command over $800,000, and exceed $6,000 per month. Nationally, over 325,000 cell sites already exist, but that number will need to 10x across a deeply decentralized uncoordinated geography.
Vertiports follow the same curve. Every office, hospital, warehouse, and shopping mall can be a launchpad if they can be integrated into a permissioned network.
When you connect thousands of rooftops with structured air corridors, you don’t just enable transport, you build an alternate logistics stack. One that bypasses roads, ports, and central bottlenecks. The sky becomes a mesh network.
Growth Requires Ownership
We discuss AI as the next leap in productivity. And it is, but the physical layer constrains it: compute, energy, connectivity, and logistics. Drones and aerial mobility are part of that layer. Similarly, antennas, sensors, and edge nodes are also included. All of them require physical placement. Without air rights, AI is homeless.
If growth is your goal, ownership must be your foundation. When people own the upside, they invest. When they can trade, they allocate. When they can price, they coordinate.
Air rights are the missing link between technological promise and material progress. They restore the basic logic of capitalism: consent, incentive, and value creation.
You don’t get flying cars by tweeting about abundance. You achieve this by respecting property rights and building the systems that enable people to turn dormant assets into active markets.
The Forcing Function
Aviation didn’t begin with top-down regulation. It started with barnstormers, mechanics, and entrepreneurs flying where no law had caught up. The internet didn’t scale because of five-year plans; it scaled because packet switching made networks emergent.
The future of the sky will be built the same way. Not with mandates, but with ownership. Not with delays, but with deals. The forcing function won’t be a government grant. It will be air rights access.
Air rights aren’t just a quirky legal artefact. They’re the connective tissue between the past and the future. Between land and sky. Between what we own and what we could.