By Stephen J. Smith | NEXT CITY
When New Yorkers imagine real estate development in their city, they tend to imagine voracious builders – they think about the crop of towers rising in downtown Brooklyn, in Williamsburg and around the High Line, the construction sites that litter the far west side and Hudson Yards, and the Billionaire’s Row of supertall skyscrapers massing south of Central Park on 57th Street, and they imagine a city overcome by developers.
The narrative of New York as captive to builders overrunning any rational bounds to growth is a popular one, but the statistics – annual housing production numbers so meager that they’d surprise even Amanda Burden, New York’s chief city planner – tell a different story.
According to numbers compiled by James Gleeson for a paper released by Greater London Mayor Boris Johnson’s office on the need to build more housing, New York’s housing production lags far behind its main “world city” competitors, London and Tokyo. In fact, despite New York’s skycraping reputation – it has more high-rises, however you count, than relatively squat Tokyo and London – it actually has more in common with Paris, a city with a reputation for being frozen in its 19th century urban form, when it comes to current growth.
When New Yorkers imagine real estate development in their city, they tend to imagine voracious builders – they think about the crop of towers rising in downtown Brooklyn, in Williamsburg and around the High Line, the construction sites that litter the far west side and Hudson Yards, and the Billionaire’s Row of supertall skyscrapers massing south of Central Park on 57th Street, and they imagine a city overcome by developers.
The narrative of New York as captive to builders overrunning any rational bounds to growth is a popular one, but the statistics – annual housing production numbers so meager that they’d surprise even Amanda Burden, New York’s chief city planner – tell a different story.
According to numbers compiled by James Gleeson for a paper released by Greater London Mayor Boris Johnson’s office on the need to build more housing, New York’s housing production lags far behind its main “world city” competitors, London and Tokyo. In fact, despite New York’s skycraping reputation – it has more high-rises, however you count, than relatively squat Tokyo and London – it actually has more in common with Paris, a city with a reputation for being frozen in its 19th century urban form, when it comes to current growth.
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