Who's giving us the most new housing in NYC? Let's look at total units filed from 2021-2025 1. By Neighborhood. #1 is LIC 2. Community Board: #1 is 401, but it's close with others in Brooklyn 🧵 for details

New ADU permit detected: 19 Truman St in Staten Island. This is a basement unit, with an approved zoning document (ZD1). CityTracker link to see updates: citytracker.ai/results/publ... More details coming soon!

The first season of the Netflix show "The Beast In Me" crucially involves a decision around (what looks like) a rezoning vote for a multi-billion mixed-use project in Manhattan. Let's try to understand the situation of the NYC council member. All quotes except the last are from him. 🧵

Let's wrap up 2025! Sometimes you just want to understand how NYC is changing. So I added the "Recap" tab, for any filter. Afterwards, you want to see it on a map, and look at individual alterations in detail. This is running live, and free to use, at citytracker.ai/results

A pattern in housing policy, e.g. measure ULA in LA: - City passes law with benefits and downsides - City doesn't evaluate - Evaluation from independent researchers like Mottsmith - Laws (maybe) get adjusted, long overdue, if they look bad We should do better! (More about NYC in upcoming thread)

Trying to better understand the NYC charter changes from the recent passed ballot questions. Here's my infographic for Q2: "Fast Track Affordable Housing to Build More Affordable Housing Across the City" Feedback welcome!

The climate change energy trifecta for NYC permits: Solar panels, Heat pumps, Batteries.

People seem to like the block-level maps of NYC. The goal is that is that you can create these yourself. For any search: See the whole city, then the blocks, then the lots. Coming soon!

The investigation into townhouse conversion continues. This one at 124 W 31st, went from 12 units to 1, at 2,842 sq ft. With its own Instagram ad instagram.com/reel/DOGxasG... and already under contract for $3.5M.

We've been talking a lot about the dreaded townhouse conversions: 2-3 units becoming one unit Where are these happening? The pattern is clear once we look at it on the block level and overlay historic districts.

New Construction filings (markers) and historic districts (yellow) in Brooklyn. They clearly don't like each other!

On moving chains, and the Honolulu paper, "The Downmarket Impact ... " (links below) Why is this relevant? It's a common belief that market-rate housing has *no* benefits for non-rich people. These benefits are indirect, from moving chains, and the article provides evidence for these benefits.

Where are we adding or removing units through alterations? First image: From 2-3 units to 1 unit. Congratulations to the Upper East Side, Park Slope, and Homecrest. Second Image: 1-Unit to 2-3 units. The outer boroughs are adding units!

I’ve heard this argument: “A big problem with upzoning is that we get new development that reduces units, e.g. pencil towers for the super-rich” In practice, for NYC: New development increases units dramatically: 2.4 => 10.2 Data: PLUTO 2018-2024

Want to understand *where* NYC permits are happening? - Solar panels: Outer boroughs - Sheds and scaffolding: Dense neighborhoods - Plumbing: Manhattan Filter by anything, and every filter becomes a map. Coming soon: citytracker.ai

In public discussion about parking, we take socialism for granted. When people worry about parking, they invariably think of "free" street parking, subsidized by the government. Or about requiring parking lots for *others*, to not affect existing street parking.

A recommendation for the MTA to increase support for the Inter-Borough-Express. Many people doubt that this corridor will have lots of demand. Commonly cited is this number: "115,000 daily riders". But ... you're not helping us understand *how* you got to this estimate.

The estimated fiscal cost for the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act bill (902) that mandates a 6-month option to buy for qualifying organizations. This just feels like it's not even trying: 1. A delay mechanically reduces transfer taxes 2. Sales prices (=> prop taxes) should go down

Does anyone have more context on the proposed "FIRST OPPORTUNITY TO PURCHASE" (TOPA) bill from the NYC council? It feels *extremely* impactful, creating a 6-month additional process for *all* sales of buildings with 3 or more units. But maybe I'm misreading? Legislation in link (attachment 2)

We're ready to track NYC: Sales, filings, permits. Work types galore. Everything's linked and tagged. Log in to save your searches. Vast majority of features are free. citytracker.ai Track away, and give me feedback!

NYC has beautiful and efficient housing due to its zoning setbacks: 1. Front: To put your garbage bins 2. Height: To make the streetscape pretty 3. Side: To give you space to breathe

Is there potential to combine the Inter-Borough-Express with upzoning? Showing block-level averages. First: Number of floors is mostly below 4, often below 1. Second: The zoned floor-area-ratio is mostly below 4, often below 1. (you might notice that these maps are similar)

Let's do a quick upzoning analysis of the Inter-Borough-Express. Within 0.5 miles of the IBX, we have 225,000 units, with average Floor-Area-Ratio of 1.6 If we doubled FAR and assumed that about 50% of the total FAR gets used over 10 years, we'd add: 200,000 units of housing! 🧵

In public projects we often make decisions based on some number, but that number is almost impossible to validate. An example: IBX in NYC is estimated to have daily ridership of 115,000. What assumptions go into this? I went through a 1,077 page report and still don't know.

Lots of discussion of the Inter-Borough-Express (IBX) in NYC. But I couldn't find a way to analyze the route on a map. So I created a dataset of the route and stops. Feedback welcome! Unofficial and using some hand coding, so give me feedback! github.com/cgoldammer/i...

Many people believe that a major driver for the NYC affordability crisis are townhouse conversions that decrease units. This exists, but: 1. Alterations + dominate - 2. Alterations (+ and - together) are dominated by new construction (>20K/year). Own chart, Housing DB

How much of your NYC neighborhood has been rezoned? - ULURP actions since 1996 - % of units by neighborhood - Warning: Many of these rezonings might be minor. - This doesn't include changes through the zoning code (e.g. the contextual downzoning)

Are there narrower homes in NYC? This lot is 9.5 ft. Challenge accepted, lots of links to cute houses in thread. If we restricted to residential units with lot frontage less than 11 ft, we get 88 results (link below). 🧵

Has anyone seen impact estimates for the NYC housing ballot questions? I hear quotes that it's a big deal, and I hope that's true, but do we have data?

We've got live feeds for NYC! Permits, sales, much more coming soon. Notifications coming soon! Beta, so give me feedback if stuff is going wrong. Will improve quickly! citytracker.ai

The "noise" section is instructive, mandated by CEQR. Result: "Increases of these magnitudes would not be perceptible". But ... to get there, we required repeated in-person measurement and complex analysis. We should be able to predict this result! It's pretty obvious.

The City council's recent mailers talk about the "730 days" for City and Environmental Reviews. So let's look at the environmental assessment for a recent "controversial" rezoning, Arrow Linen. 244 units in Brooklyn. 7 versions over 3 years, latest at 289 pages. Contents in image. A 🧵

I'd love to see the source for this calculation. Is the 730 days the ULURP process (filing => approval)? I'm getting very different answers. (Not commenting on the politics of it for now)

There's nothing scarier than bad land usage.

Some more examples: Buildings in NYC with 1-2 floors in locations with price per square foot above $1,500. Feast your eyes on this land use!

One of my favorite filters for NYC real estate: Buildings with 1-2 floors in great locations: Predicted price per square foot above $1,000 There is 5,700 of them, excluding parking lots, churches, etc. Examples in 🧵

Common in news reports: "We did urbanism (e.g. super-blocks in Barcelona), and rents increased by 20%. Bad, now it's no longer affordable". Better framing: We found a cheap way of making a block 20% better. So let's do that everywhere, to get the benefits without displacement!

The application in Staten Island give us a good illustration of how neighborhoods change. A developer said: We can turn 2 dwelling units into 10 (or 15, stylized timeline in image). Other developers likely ... wait and see until new comps are set. *If* that's good, development explodes.

In previous posts, I exaggerated and called the city of yes opposition in Staten Island a “protest”, but the actual protest has since happened! With mayoral candidate and all! www.silive.com/news/2025/10...

This city of yes application in Staten Island (see recent posts) is fascinating: 1 building => 5 buildings, 2 dwelling units => up to 15. If this holds up, it should be possible almost anywhere in the neighborhood, see qualifying lots in image.

Why are we seeing City of Yes protests in Staten Island? It's because of how transit-oriented development (TOD) was handled, requiring a 5,000 sq ft lot. Common in SI, rare elsewhere. The map shows % of lots that qualify for TOD Thanks @3underscores.bsky.social for the lead!

New housing and rent, V2: In places like NYC, we restricted supply (e.g. 1961 zoning), green -> purple. If demand increases, we'll see sky-high rents. So it's "causing" high rents, right? No! It's satisfying formerly unmet demand. But the restrictions make this correlation *more* misleading.

NYC runs on steam. And even in 2024, there's still a good business from getting people connected. On the left is the district steam system, run by ConEd. On the right are ConEd's business leads.

NYC property taxes: Step 1: Do the inverse of a land value tax: lower taxes for lower density. => Not enough housing and vacant plots => Step 2: We need tax incentive program to build more, but it’s not so well designed => We get *some* large buildings, at exactly 99 units, nothing bigger

The NYC property tax system is unequal *by design*. The baseline effective tax rate for residential buildings (assessment rate x tax rate) Class 1 (1-3 units) = 1.2% Class 2 (> 3 units) = 5.6% Example in image per CSS report:

Bringing it all together: New developments, sales, permits. Anything else you want to track?

In housing, there's a "damning" correlation: More housing, higher rents. This can happen when demand is increasing (Vancouver, NYC, etc). Then, market outcomes slope upward. The real causality? Increasing supply (shifting curve, which we haven't tried) would lower rents.

Parking is a huge part of opposition to new housing in NYC. When street parking is "free", each car gets 250sq feet (50% of a studio) of subsidized space, let's say that's worth $200,000. More neighbors? The lost parking will cost you up to $200,000! (Charging for parking removes this conflict)

The NYC residential development pipeline is now live! Understand events (e.g. the wild permit spike in 2022) or follow the cumulative pipeline over time. This is all interactive: Change filters (neighborhood, zoning, etc) and the whole pipeline updates. zonedinsights.com/search/all/p...

A common argument: "Why upzone? Population has been shrinking". This assumes that people leave because demand is low (green). But they might also leave because supply is restricted and prices are high (red). If people are leaving but rents are high, the reason is supply.