It may seem like New York City is in the midst of a building boom, with new developments continuing to go up in areas including Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn. But a new report prepared by the Department of City Planning refutes that, and makes the case that New York City needs to build more housing to keep up with its “explosive” job growth.

The report, titled “The Geography of Jobs,” delves into the city’s and tri-state area’s economic growth, in particular its employment trends and housing needs—and found that the latter is not keeping pace with the former.

New York City has the densest concentrations of employment within the tri-state region, with an average of 150,000 workers per square mile in Lower Manhattan. The city also gained more than 90,000 jobs per year on average since 2010 and 309,000 workers, which represents more than half the region’s labor force growth.

But New York City’s housing production declined an average of 25 percent from pre- to post- Great Recession. Between 2001 and 2018 NYC added 770,000 jobs and 407,000 housing units, or 362,900 more net new jobs than housing units.

“Though NYC produced relatively consistent numbers of new housing units pre- and post-Great Recession, job growth significantly outpaced housing production in the last decade—by a rate of 3.6 net new jobs for every unit permitted,” the report reads.

Between 2000 and 2017, the number of residents of the region commuting into NYC for work grew by 24 percent, all while the number of NYC workers who commute from within the city also grew, by 29 percent.

(source: curbed nyc)