Where is housing being added in New York City?

The NYC Department of City Planning’s (DCP)  Housing Database  contains all NYC Department of Buildings (DOB)-approved housing construction and demolition jobs filed or completed in NYC since January 1, 2010. It includes all three construction job types that add or remove residential units: new buildings, major alterations, and demolitions.

While new construction accounts for most housing growth in the city, the redevelopment and repurposing of existing buildings also play important roles in how much housing we have. Alterations may increase unit counts through conversion of nonresidential buildings, subdivision of existing homes, or enlargement of buildings; they may also decrease units through the combination of units, such as the combination of adjacent units in a co-op building or the conversion of a two-family house to a single-family. Housing units can also be lost to building demolitions. These losses decrease the net number of housing units, or the number of housing units added minus the number of housing units lost.

The following maps and charts summarize data from the  Housing Database  at three geographies: community districts, City Council districts, and neighborhood tabulation area (NTAs). Additional housing and economic analyses are also  available .

Download Housing Database project-level files and summary files  here .

The NYC Department of City Planning’s (DCP) Housing Database contains all NYC Department of Buildings (DOB)-approved housing construction and demolition jobs filed or completed in NYC since January 1, 2010. It includes all three construction job types that add or remove residential units: new buildings, major alterations, and demolitions, and can be used to determine the change in legal housing units across time and space. Records in the Database are geocoded to the greatest level of precision possible, subject to numerous quality assurance and control checks, recoded for usability, and joined to other housing data sources relevant to city planners and analysts.

DOB Open Data are the primary source for the NYC Department of City Planning’s (DCP) Housing Database, and despite efforts DCP makes to correct errors, there are still unknown inaccuracies throughout the data. The data are administrative in nature, and most of the information associated with a record is provided by the applicant, and not necessarily verified by DCP.

The DCP Housing Database is based on DOB Open Data to identify housing construction. However, not all construction in NYC occurs legally by approval through the DOB. Illegal conversions of the housing stock may be prevalent in certain neighborhoods but are not represented in this data.

DCP uses information such as job description, occupancy codes, and unit change to differentiate hotels and class B units from class A housing units. However, there may be hotels and class B units that DCP could not identify using these means.