The New York Department of Buildings has mapped the biggest current permits: new buildings, and Alteration Type 1s (alterations that include changes to occupancy) that include expansion: here. To put that in perspective, there are approximately a million buildings in the city, so the 7178 open major permits represent a little under one percent of the city’s buildings. The biggest projects – 98 stories, or 3,900,000 square feet of new space, or half a billion dollars – catch your eye, of course, but they’re not representative. The average project (I’m guessing the averages are medians, not means, but I don’t know for certain) is 27,000 square feet and $4,300,000. That’s not tiny or cheap, but it’s a comprehensible scale.
It’s easy to get swept away in the numbers, as appears to have happened to the Times reporter who covered this. Yes, the DoB issued 168,233 permits in 2017, but only a few thousand were for major projects. The remainder was Alt Type 2 and Type 3 – repairs and small interior alterations – and for ordinary maintenance and repair work on elevators and boilers and similar equipment. To take that number literally would mean that one out of six buildings in the city were being worked on at once in some real way, and that has not and will not happen.
The map shows where development is hot and is thus simultaneously a map of development and gentrification. The far west side of Manhattan has a huge amount of work as the last stage of deindustrialization; the brownstone neighborhoods of Brooklyn are hot, as is, amazingly, the South Bronx. The best news is the construction of 129,000 new apartments in a city that desperately needs them.
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