The outer boroughs get all the action.
Nine of the 10 New York City neighborhoods with the most apartments under construction are in Queens and Brooklyn, according to a study released this week from Localize.city.
Long Island City has the most units in the pipeline slated to be complete by 2020; it’s expecting 6,374. The waterfront neighborhood, which has come to be synonymous with tall residential towers along the East River and around Queens Plaza, is followed by Williamsburg (with 3,470 units on the way), Bushwick (2,537), Greenpoint (2,017) and Bed-Stuy (1,969).
In total, Localize.city researchers calculated that 12,800 new housing units opened in the first half of 2018 and another 31,000 are on track to be complete by 2020. Its projections show that between 2016 and 2020, New York will gain 90,000 new apartments. Sixty percent of those are in Brooklyn and Queens.
In fact, the only Manhattan neighborhood to make the top 10 is the Lower East Side, whose new units include those in megaproject Essex Crossing and East River-fronting condo tower One Manhattan Square.
Localize.city, a platform that provides neighborhood insights based on available New York City data, attributes the boom in new construction to a slew of building permit filings in 2015 that are finally becoming reality.
Influxes of new apartments can affect neighborhoods in different ways. There are potential benefits — an increase in supply could reduce housing costs, for one — as well as possible downsides, like noise and dust from construction sites as well as overcrowding of communal resources like schools and public transit.