This problem was made for Property class!
The Nasher contends that the developers of the $200 million tower, completed in January, have been intransigent in refusing to modify its reflective glass skin; the Nasher has proposed louvers for the facade.
Museum officials say the garden has had to be resodded twice because of the higher temperatures created by sunlight bouncing off the glass; that some trees have burned; and that light-blocking panels were needed for the roof during a recent Ken Price sculpture retrospective.
This is like the Fountainbleau Hotel, in reverse. The adjacent property doesn’t want the sunlight!
This would seem like a perfect application of the Coase Theorem. The ideal solution would be to add some sort of sun-light dampening device, though no such option seems available, short of redoing the entire exterior. In the alternative, the high-rise should pay for the cost of the burdens suffered by the museum. Though, there seems to be massive amounts of transaction costs–namely, the parties hate each other, and one side has turned to fake social media profiles to bolster his case.
I’ve blogged about other Coasean bargaining in Texas.
H/T PropertyLawProf