Design & Housing Typologies October 2024

Taking Stock

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New York City’s housing defies simple description. It ranges from mansions in Riverdale to small homes in Midland Beach, garden apartments in Sunnyside to high-rises near Central Park, brownstones to tenements, early-20th century public housing to recently built supportive housing, with even more varieties in between. And for good reason — it takes a wide range of housing types to address the needs of a vast and diverse population.

To make sound housing policy, we must begin with a clear understanding of our housing stock. This series of data visualizations, drawn from the 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, can help ground debates and discussions in a shared understanding of the housing we have today.

THE WHOLE STOCK

There are about 3.7 million housing units in the five boroughs.

Half of all NYC’s housing is found in Brooklyn and Queens. Manhattan, with just 7.5 percent of the city’s land, contains a quarter of its housing units. Staten Island contains just five percent of the city’s housing.

BUILDING SIZE

Multifamily housing and small homes mix differently in each borough.

The majority of NYC’s housing units are in apartment buildings. 62 percent are in buildings with six or more units, and over half are in buildings of 20 or more units. However, small homes are also well represented, making up over a quarter of all housing units.

The scale of buildings generally reflects centrality, transit access, and density. In Manhattan, nearly all units (97 percent) are in buildings of six or more units, while in Staten Island, 83 percent of units are in one- or two-family homes. Brooklyn, which encompasses both very dense and less dense areas, has the most even distribution of building sizes among the boroughs.

BEDROOM MIX

Small buildings have more bedrooms per unit; large buildings have fewer.

Citywide, 39 percent of housing units are studios or one-bedrooms, 32 percent are two-bedrooms, and 29 percent have three or more bedrooms.

Nearly two-thirds of the units in small homes (single- and two-family homes) contain three or more bedrooms, compared to only 11 percent of the units in buildings of 50 or more units. In buildings with 50 or more units, more than half the units are studios and one-bedrooms, while only nine percent of units in small homes are.

This again corresponds with density: half of all housing units in Manhattan are studios or one-bedrooms, compared to only 16 percent in Staten Island.

AGE OF BUILDING

New York City’s housing is old - highlighting the importance of upkeep and investment.

More than 80 percent of NYC’s housing was built more than 50 years ago. That’s roughly three million units that are older than hip hop or the BIC lighter – built while the Third Avenue El was still carrying passengers.

Over half of units, about 2 million, were constructed before 1947. That’s 54 percent of the city’s housing stock that is older than Bazooka gum or the transistor – built before the independence of India and Pakistan.

Many things have changed over the years, but not bedroom mix.

While household size has declined substantially over the past century, the bedroom count of NYC’s housing is fairly consistent regardless of when it was built. The variation that exists once again bears a relationship to geography: studio and one-bedroom apartments have been more common since 2000, a period in which most new housing has been built in central, higher-density locations, while  larger apartments were more common in housing built between 1974 and 1999, when more construction was occurring in less central locations.

Age can show.

As might be expected, there are more reported housing problems in the older housing stock. 17 percent of pre-war housing units report 3 or more housing problems, in comparison to 7.7 percent in the newer stock.

TENURE

New York is a city of renters — even in homeownership housing.

Roughly two-thirds of NYC’s housing units are occupied by renters. Surprisingly, more condominium units are occupied by renters (60 percent) than by owners. There are also more renter-occupied units than owner-occupied units in two-family homes.

There are still over 1.1 million owner-occupied units, the largest number of which are single-family homes and coops.

RENTS AND REGULATORY STATUS

Housing exists at a wide range of rents ...

The median contract rent varies among the boroughs, shaped by market conditions and regulations restricting rents. Manhattan has the highest median rent at $2,148. Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island each have a median rent closer to the citywide median, ranging from $1,600-$1,740. The Bronx has the lowest median monthly rent at $1,280.

... but at any rent, housing is mostly unavailable.

Under conditions of sufficient supply, housing with lower rents often shows a higher vacancy rate, reflecting its lesser quality and relative undesirability compared to other options.

In stark contrast, with New York City’s many low-income households and its extreme housing shortage, units renting for less than $1,100 per month have an effectively zero vacancy rate (0.39 percent). At this rate, only about 2,300 apartments at this rent level would be vacant and available at a given moment.

Units renting for more than $2,400 a month still only have a 3.39 percent vacancy rate, far below the five percent threshold that has traditionally been used to define the existence of a housing emergency.

Rents are regulated in more than half of the city’s rental housing.

Forty-one percent of rental housing is subject to rent stabilization, which limits annual rent increases. An additional seven percent of rental housing is public housing, with rents based on resident incomes and strong security of tenure for residents.

As one might expect, median rents are highest among unregulated rental units, and the lowest median rents are in public housing. However, market rental housing is also an important low-cost housing resource: there are more market-rate units than public housing units renting for less than $1,100 per month.

More problems are reported in regulated housing.

Market units have the lowest rates of reported housing problems, such as presence of rodents or mold in unit, among rental housing. Regulated housing has higher rates, with the highest for public housing. Only 10 percent of market rental units report three or more housing problems, in comparison to 45 percent of public housing units.

NOTE ON SOURCE DATA

This visualization is based on data drawn from the 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey. The HVS is a longitudinal, sample-based survey conducted periodically by the U.S. Census Bureau on behalf of the City of New York. It provides extensive insights into the composition and condition of the city’s housing stock. Note that as a sample-based survey, total figures reported here may vary somewhat from administrative data sources.

We have made the data used in these visualizations downloadable, but you can access the HVS public use files, a summary of selected initial findings, and more information directly at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s website.