New York Has More Than 500 Vacant Buildings
Aug. 17, 2017 — "Jam-packed" New York is full of vacant opportunities.
Land values in New York City are in the stratosphere, all buildings are filled to capacity, and feasible sites for development are almost impossible to find, right? Well, yes and no.
OneTitle National Guaranty Company has released a report identifying 541 likely vacant buildings, representing 137 zip codes throughout all five boroughs of New York City, including some of the city’s most priciest and most desirable neighborhoods. The report reveals meaningful development opportunities, even in high-cost neighborhoods, and indicates the likely presence of additional untapped prospects for real estate developers, as well as city agencies and nonprofits seeking affordable housing solutions.
The OneTitle research team identified the buildings by analyzing nearly 40,000 complaints reported through the city’s 3-1-1 non-emergency service line and associated digital portals – information available because of the city’s five-year-old Open Data Law and newly accessible via the NYC Open Data Web portal launched in March 2017. OneTitle sought to identify entirely vacant structures versus more easily identified vacant storefronts and empty lots, given that the former rarely reflect development opportunities, and developers and the city already focus on the latter properties.
With 155 vacant properties each, Brooklyn and Queens collectively contain more than half of all the sites identified. There are more vacant properties in Manhattan (63) than Staten Island (58), and 110 sites in the Bronx.
“Our findings show a surprisingly broad geographic distribution of completely vacant structures in New York City hiding in plain sight, all while we continually hear from our developer clients that development sites are becoming more difficult to identify and acquire on economically reasonable terms,” says Daniel Price, co-founder, president and CEO of OneTitle. “In addition, the work exemplifies how the availability of public data can lead to crowdsourced solutions of great value to corporations, municipalities and the public.”