Last year was a big one for residential construction all over the city, with the Department of Buildings green-lighting construction on 1,998 residential buildings to bring a total of over 56,000 new units to the city’s inventory.
That’s according to a new report by the New York Building Congress, which analyzed US Census data to get its figures.
Brooklyn stood out for having nearly half—46%—of all residential units permitted to be built in all five boroughs. In other words, more units than Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island combined.
Another feather in Brooklyn’s construction hard hat: The number of units permitted in the borough more than tripled in 2015, going from 7,551 in 2014 to more than 26,000.
NYBC president Richard Anderson puts that in perspective in the report, noting that in 11 of the previous 15 years, the entire city saw fewer new units permitted than Brooklyn saw last year.
The new multifamily construction has several hotspots, including Williamsburg’s waterfront and Gowanus, but nowhere is the pace of new development as intense as in Downtown Brooklyn, where more than double the number of units will soon be added to the borough’s inventory since the area’s 2004 rezoning.
