New Apartment Production Downtown Highest in Six Years
In 2024, a total of 870 new homes were built in Community District 1 (CD1), according to data newly released by Department of City Planning (DCP). This places CD1 (a collage of neighborhoods encompassing 1.5 square miles, bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge) second in Manhattan, behind Community District 4 (the West Side from 14th to 59th Streets, west of Sixth Avenue, 26th Street, and Eighth Avenue), which saw 1,364 new homes created last year. Among the 59 Community Districts throughout the five boroughs, CD1 ranked ninth, with the other Community Districts in which more housing stock was created spread across Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
According to the same DCP data set, a total of 9,976 new homes were built in CD1 since 2010. Last year was the fourth most active during that interval, with annual totals surpassing the 2024 tally coming only in 2011, 2016, and 2018.
The pace of local housing production appears poised to ratchet up further in the foreseeable future. The massive office-to-residential conversion at 25 Water Street, which is slated to open later this year, will by itself surpass the 2024 total for all of Lower Manhattan by 50 percent, with 1,320 new apartments in a single building.
Moreover, the office conversion at 25 Water Street is less of an outlier than a harbinger. A recent report from the Downtown Alliance notes, “3,221 units across five new developments were announced in 2024 – all of them conversions. Of the over 8,000 units either under construction or planned, 64 percent are also conversions.”
A separate analysis from PropertyShark, a real estate web site and search engine that tracks sales and price data, documents that the Financial District is home to 7.9 million square feet of “highly convertible” office space spread across 36 buildings, and another 23.2 million square feet of “convertible but challenging” buildings. In Tribeca, are 2.4 million and 2.3 million square feet, respectively, in the corresponding categories.
Using as metrics the average size of a Manhattan apartment (approximately 750 square feet) and the architectural guideline that about 85 percent of an apartment building’s interior can be used as residential space (with the rest going to common areas like hallways, elevator shafts, stairwells, and utility cores, as well as laundry and trash rooms) this may indicate that Lower Manhattan could be in line for approximately 12,500 new households in the years ahead, using the conservative baseline of only the space deemed as “highly convertible.”
This could mean that the latter half of the 2020s and the first half of the next decade may bring more than four times as many new homes to Lower Manhattan than were created in the past 15 years.