How does NYC lose housing units? - NEW YORK, NY
While New York is in the midst of a housing shortage, it is important to both create new housing while also preserving the housing that already exists. Since 2010, almost 210,000 units of housing were added to NYC’s housing stock. During that same time, however, more than 36,000 units were lost to demolition, conversion to other uses like hotels, and combining adjacent apartments. These losses were most concentrated in affluent, transit-rich neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Greenwich Village and SoHo, and Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. These neighborhoods also witness very little new construction, resulting in more housing units being lost than are being constructed.
While cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and London regulate unit loss, NYC has made it easier to combine apartments, which accounts for the most significant number of units coming offline. Typically, construction projects affecting a building’s occupancy are required to file a major alteration permit, called an A1 permit. However, in 1968 and then again in 1997, New York City downgraded construction projects that would combine units to a minor alteration permit, or A2 permit. These types of permits are usually issued for jobs like upgrading the sprinkler system or minor interior renovations. Significantly, this means that when units combine, the building’s certificate of occupancy does not have to be updated to reflect the number of units within that building. This results in an undercount of the existing units.
Because units being lost through unit combinations are not being tracked, I pulled nearly 20,000 A2 permits, and read job descriptions for a sample of about 3,000 jobs, noting how many units were existing before the work, how many would exist after, and finding the difference.
To read a one page report of this work, please click here (274 KB).