This article originally appeared in Anderson Kill's Real Estate & Construction Advisor.

As the amount of available land upon which to build decreases, landowners and developers often find themselves searching for new and innovative ways to maximize the value of their properties. It is ironic, then, that one of the most innovative, yet underutilized, methods of maximizing land value is not new at all. For over thirty-five years, the New York City Educational Construction Fund (“ECF”) has maximized the value of many New York City sites by simply leveraging the value of the air rights over those sites to fund the construction of city schools as part of combined-occupancy structures.