Flats Curve Upward

More New Apartments Approved Downtown Than Anywhere Else

Municipal officials in 2023 approved more new housing units for Lower Manhattan than in any other community in the five boroughs, according to new metrics from the Housing Database maintained by the Department of City Planning.

This compendium indicates that last year, City regulators approved the construction 2,058 new homes within Community District 1 (CD1), a quilt of neighborhoods measuring 1.5 square miles south of a line formed by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

For comparison, the second largest total of approved new units anywhere in the five boroughs was for Community District 7 in Queens, covering Flushing, College Point, Whitestone, and Willets Point. At 12.7 square miles, this catchment is almost nine times larger than the footprint of CD1, and has population nearly quintuple that of Lower Manhattan, but it is slated to receive only 1,376 new homes.

The 2,058 new dwellings for which construction permits were issued in Lower Manhattan last year are all conversions, in which former office towers are repurposed as apartment buildings. More than half of these are accounted for by the conversion of 25 Water Street (photograph above), where 1,300 new units are planned. Another large office conversion in progress is 55 Broad Street, which will bring 571 new homes to Lower Manhattan. Among those seeking approval this year are the owners of 222 Broadway, for conversion to 600 units.

The apartments approved in 2023 represent almost 25 percent of the total number of new homes built in Lower Manhattan in the 13 years preceding 2023 (9,247 apartments, according to the Housing Database). They will also comprise an increase of approximately five percent over CD1’s existing inventory of 41,977 homes.

These dwellings likely will bring more than 4,150 new residents to the community, based on 2020 census data, which indicates that the typical size of a Lower Manhattan household is now 2.02 persons. This implies an increase of slightly more than five percent over the current CD1 population of 78,390.