The Real Deal regularly shows you what’s entering the city’s new development pipeline, but now you can see everything that ends up getting built, too.
Using the Department of Buildings’ temporary certificate of occupancy — a document that developers need before people can legally live and work in new buildings — we created a time-lapse map of every new building or conversion to officially open its doors in New York City since January 2013, breaking down the data into residential, retail, hotel, office and storage properties.
The map allows you to see firsthand how the hundreds of new building plans reported over the years have added to the city streetscape. Hotel development has greatly accelerated in Queens’ Long Island City and in Midtown Manhattan’s Garment District over the past few years, as the purple dots in the map show. Harlem’s residential boom is particularly notable in the map, with projects largely concentrated in the blocks south of 125th Street, just north of Central Park, where more than 20 new residential buildings have opened since 2013.
But for some current hotspots of development, however, like the South Bronx, it’s too early to see the growth, as most of the announced projects there have either started construction fairly recently or are still in the planning stage.
Where the map is blank is also telling. Transit deserts like Maspeth in Queens and Southeast Brooklyn have seen next to no construction over the past few years. The most northern sections of East New York are also low on new buildings, a reality that could change following the de Blasio administration’s upzoning of that neighborhood to allow for more residential development.
Yoryi DeLaRosa and Reginald Barley, Jr. contributed research to this report.