Development Tracking for New York City Neighborhoods
Explore all permit applications for New Building (NB) jobs in NYC — currently free to browse on Citiesense.
At the rate that public data is becoming open and accessible, it comes as no surprise that New York City is a front runner in any kind of open data marathon. The people behind the curtain for the largest city in the US have done a commendable job of keeping up with information technologies and enabling innovation under hashtags like #civictech, #opengov, #govtech, and of course #opendata.
At Citiesense, we continue to leverage open data whenever/wherever we can, enabling our users to harness public data for specific city planning and real estate related workflows. As a result, we decided it was high-time the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) permit applications data was mapped and made accessible.
NYC’s Department of Information Technology (@NYCDoIT) shares the City’s DOB datasets through a Socrata open data portal hosted here. The data is not mapped in its raw format (no geojson option), so we joined it with New York City geographic data provided by the City’s Planning Department to align it with actual properties boundaries, or parcels on our City Map. The only issue this presents is some complication when parcels are subdivided and new parcels show up in the dataset, but we have a solution for that as well.
The DOB permit applications range from filings for small alterations, such as a renovation to a ground level retail space, to more involved jobs that propose changes to property use and or occupancy- for instance, the construction of entire new mixed-use buildings. We decided to show an example of how this dataset looks mapped by showing all New Building jobs (job type NB) as an interactive map layer on our City Map of New York.
Now for the first time anyone can access this open data on a map to visualize where development activity is occurring in the largest city in the US.
Once we had this information available on our City Map, we set up a system to send our users notifications about new filings as the applications are added to the DOB’s electronic filing system, and our map.
If notifications about development activity via building permit filings is something that interests you, let us know so we can get you set up! We created an analytical map that can provide a deep-dive into this incredibly useful dataset for development tracking. When this analytical map is paired with other Citiesense features, like email notifications about new permit filings, becoming a local real estate development market expert is quick and easy to stay on top of.
