Long Island City Leads Nation in New Apartment Construction

Co-ops still far outnumber condo apartments in New York City, though most new construction today – especially at the high end – skews heavily toward condos. But as the city’s real estate market has rebounded from the brutal recession over the past decade, some people failed to notice a very different sort of boom: in rental apartment construction.

New York City contains five of the top ten national neighborhoods with the biggest surge of rental apartment construction since 2010, the blog Rent Cafe reports. The statistics are based on data from Yardi Matrix and Property Shark in about 1,000 neighborhoods coast to coast, and it include rental buildings of 50 or more units in America’s 30 largest cities.

The breakaway winner was Long Island City, Queens, with 12,553 new apartments, nearly twice as many as the runner-up, downtown Los Angeles. Also in the top 10 are: #4 Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan; #6 Williamsburg, Brooklyn; #8 downtown Brooklyn; and #10 the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

In Long Island City, the 12,533 new apartments are located in 41 buildings, and they account for 36 percent of all rental apartments in the neighborhood.