Not only is the New York City skyline iconic–and the world’s second tallest–it’s also constantly growing. And while 33,000 new apartments are being built in New York, the city is actually leading the pack, and faster than many other U.S. cities at that! The latest development report from StorageCafe shows that NYC ranks first in new apartment construction over the past 44 years, blowing all other major hubs out of the water.
Since 1980, New York City has issued permits for over 679,000 new multifamily apartments, nearly double the number in Los Angeles, the runner-up. In fact, in the first half of the 2020s, NYC has been issuing nearly 26,000 new permits annually, surpassing the average of all previous decades and nearly five times more than the 1990s.
And while NYC doesn’t even find itself in the top 20 cities leading single family home construction–hence why home prices remain sky-high in NYC–Phoenix, AZ, who’s paving the way in this category, has only had 215,000 single family homes permitted between 1980 and 2023, not even coming close to NYC’s 679,000 new multifamily apartments alone.
But it’s not just apartments being built, NYC is also America’s top destination for office construction–255 million square feet of new office space has popped up in the city since 1980, and over 29 million square feet of storage space has been delivered to NYC since 1980 (more than anywhere else in the nation), proving that we really are the city that never sleeps.
With that being said, if there’s one thing we’re going to notice about NYC it’s that cranes and scaffolding have been dominating its skyline–though “Shed the Shed” aims to reduce the amount of time scaffolding stays up at construction sites–but if we’re looking to not have to spend hours waiting on lines to view apartments around the city, we’ll deal with cranes and scaffolding so long as it means more apartment construction.
To conduct their report, StorageCafe turned to data from the U.S. Census as well as their sister research divisions, Commercial Edge and Yardi Matrix. They analyzed real estate activity across the U.S. from 1980 to 2023, covering six major sectors: single family, multifamily, industrial, office, retail and self storage. They then zoomed in on the country’s top 100 largest cities to rank the most active real estate markets in the U.S.
The full report is on their website.