Features

As New York City enters the second half of the 2020s, YIMBY commemorates five years of sharing detailed quarterly and annual statistics on new building permits filed with the Department of Buildings. Our 2025 Construction Report reveals that in 2024, the city’s developers filed 2,744 new building permits, which combine for a total of more than 71 million square feet. These structures will supply nearly 53,000 new residential and hotel units upon completion, as well as ample newly constructed space for commercial, institutional, and other uses. Below we take a close look at the aggregated data and delineate emergent trends and patterns in a series of analyses of building height, floor area, location, and more.

A City Council subcommittee on Thursday approved Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to build 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years, lowering the cost of rent for New Yorkers amid one of the worst housing crises in city history. Dubbed “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” the rezoning proposal aims to spur the creation of affordable housing in all five boroughs, along with upgrades to critical infrastructure. The approval by the City Council Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises and Committee on Land Use was secured following a $5 billion pledge from the city and state.

As temperatures begin to drop, New York City’s construction market shows no signs of cooling down. New York YIMBY’s construction report for the third quarter of 2024, based on permit filings submitted to the Department of Buildings during the three-month period from July through September, shows strong filing activity that indicates momentum is continuing from the preceding quarterly tallies. In the third quarter, New York’s developers filed permits for a total of 1,071 new buildings, measuring a combined 26.8 million square feet with 18,935 residential and hotel units. Below, we break the data down in a series of detailed analyses. A complete data sheet, with detailed information on each proposed development, is available with a subscription to YIMBY’s Building Wire.

As New York City simmers in some of the year’s hottest weeks, the city’s construction and real estate markets remain equally hot. The second quarter of the year, which spans the period from April through June, registered a total of 1,077 new building permits filed with the city’s Department of Buildings. As such, Q2 2024 counts the second-highest number of new permit filings since YIMBY began its tally at the start of the decade and continues the strong trend established in the two preceding quarters, which now count the first- and third-highest permit filing totals. The 14,795 filed-for residential and hotel units also make for one of the highest quarterly counts of the decade, as do the 21.5 million filed-for square feet of new building floor area. YIMBY has meticulously vetted each of the thousand-plus new building permits submitted to the city in the second quarter and compiled a series of charts and analyses that look at emergent overarching trends.

New York YIMBY has tallied the records for new building permit filings for the first quarter of 2024, and the results are one for the record books. According to data compiled from permit filings submitted to the Department of Buildings, during the three-month period from January through March, builders throughout the city filed a combined total of 19,819 residential and hotel units, the highest total for any three-month period since YIMBY started tracking the statistic in 2020. Similarly, the combined filed-for square footage of 26 million is also the highest quarterly tally for the decade so far.