Welcome to Issue No. 36 of The Rubin Report: The Pulse of the NYC Development Market.

Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings, Happy Chanukah & Merry Christmas NYC.

I’m a Landonomist™, a term I coined for being politically agnostic and focused on what policy actually does to land values, zoning, taxes, housing, and development economics.

This issue includes one clear prediction for what’s coming next in NYC’s development landscape, plus a deeper dive into the latest scoreboards shaping the market: the one-year City of Yes results, REBNY’s Q3 2025 new-building pipeline, and the New York Building Congress 2025–2027 construction outlook.

There’s no better way to close out the year than with a list of what I’m thankful for in the world of NYC development. Development is no longer a dirty word, it’s a necessity, and development sites have become the most in-demand asset classes in the city.

Here’s what I’m grateful for, and what I believe is being unlocked next.

We have to start this list with, NYC Mayor Eric Adams - Thank you, Mayor Eric Adams, for leading what has been the most pro-housing administration in New York City history and for putting real numbers behind it, with roughly 426,800 homes created, preserved, or planned through the end of last fiscal year, now reportedly over 433,250. Without your leadership, City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the 80,000-home plan with $5B in infrastructure, along with City of Yes for Families and the hard-won Albany tools like new multifamily and office-conversion tax incentives, FAR cap relief, and a path to safer basement apartments, simply wouldn’t have been possible.

The City of Yes for Economic Opportunity: I was lucky to be part of a small working group, of less than 40 people, that convened to discuss and provide feedback on the City of Yes: Zoning for Economic Opportunity citywide text amendment. This modernized zoning rules to help businesses find space and grow, support entrepreneurs and freelancers, boost growing industries, and enable more vibrant streetscapes and commercial corridors.

The City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality: Made it easier to generate renewable energy, make buildings greener & more efficient, supports the growth of electric vehicle & e-micromobility as well as reduces waste & stormwater run-offs.

The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity: This represented the most significant overhaul since 1961, expanding housing production by allowing a Universal Affordability Preference that let buildings add at least 20% more homes (at 60% AMI), easing office and other non-residential conversions, and making parking optional, while also legalizing more “missing middle” options like ADUs, 2–4 story town centers over retail, 3–5 story transit-oriented buildings in low-density areas, height-limited contextual infill on campuses like churches, and more small/shared housing.

Bronx-Metro North Station Area Plan: Designed to accompany four new Metro-North stations coming to Parkchester/Van Nest, Morris Park, Hunts Point, and Co-op City in 2027, the plan is expected to create approximately 7,000 homes, including permanently income-restricted affordable housing, and 10,000 permanent jobs, along with improved public spaces and enhanced access to mass transit.

Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan: The plan will bring approximately 4,600 homes including 1,900 income-restricted, affordable homes and 2,800 permanent jobs to the Atlantic Avenue corridor near Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan will revitalize a roughly 21-block stretch of Atlantic Avenue and neighboring streets between Vanderbilt Avenue and Nostrand Avenue.

Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan: This plan will create 9,500 new homes across 42 blocks of Midtown South, where outdated zoning rules did not previously allow new housing. Additionally, by mapping Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) onto the neighborhood for the first time and requiring new developments to include affordable housing, the final plan ensures that up to 2,800 of the new homes will be permanently-affordable as well.

Jamaica Neighborhood Plan: The plan will update the area’s zoning code to create nearly 12,000 new homes across nearly 230 blocks of this transit-accessible neighborhood. Additionally, by mapping Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) in the neighborhood at scale for the first time and requiring new developments to include affordable housing, the plan will ensure that approximately 4,000 of the new homes are permanently affordable.

OneLIC Neighborhood Plan: This plan will create approximately 14,700 new homes, including 4,350 permanently affordable homes through the use of Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and city subsidy programs. Altogether, the OneLIC plan will generate the most housing of any neighborhood-specific rezoning in at least 25 years. The plan’s boundaries stretch from the East River waterfront to Crescent Street and Queens Plaza North to 47th Avenue, with one segment reaching further up to 39th Avenue between 21st Street to 23rd Street.

White Plains Road Neighborhood Plan (In Progress): The plan will focus on a stretch of White Plains Road from Adee Avenue to the south and the Bronx/Mount Vernon border to the north, as well as intersecting portions of Gun Hill Road and East 233rd Street. The area has access to a range of transit options, including the 2 and 5 trains that run along White Plains Road, nearby Metro-North stations and a variety of local and express buses.

NYC Industrial Plan (In Progress): This plan has 5 goals: 1. To enable industrial businesses to evolve, innovate, and modernize. 2. To advance a balanced & coherent land and real estate strategy. 3. To support modern & efficient freight movements. 4. To promote clean & safe industrial areas and 5. To prepare industrial areas for climate threats. (I do hope they also look to allow residential in certain parts of the IBZ, this can unlock 1million housing units. Right now this plan does not do that. I can share my study if anyone wants to dig deeper. It just makes sense!)

City of Yes for Families (In Progress): This pending plan includes family-friendly zoning proposals to make it easier to co-locate housing and schools, increase access to fresh, healthy food via the Food Retail Expansion Program to Support Health (FRESH), enhance the Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) program to encourage the creation of more playgrounds and public spaces, and improve the accessibility of public transit stations. City of Yes for Families also includes non-zoning measures to create more family-sized income-restricted affordable homes, help families make a downpayment on a home, make it easier to add an accessory dwelling unit to their property, and count rental payments towards credit history.

The Manhattan Plan (In Progress): The Manhattan Plan is an initiative to reverse that trend by adding 100,000 new homes to the borough over the next decade, allowing Manhattan to pass the 1 million homes mark.

The Shared Housing Roadmap (In Progress):  The legislation will re-legalize shared housing and modify the Housing Maintenance Code, Building Code, and Fire Code to make new construction and conversion of nonresidential floor area to shared housing legal, as-of-right, in New York City. New shared housing will be built based on flexible new regulations which allow for a range of shared housing typologies from more traditional Single Room Occupancy (SRO) to suites or dorm-style cohousing, all with new standards to ensure effective tenant protection and high quality and safety standards. What is shared housing? Shared housing is 2 or more independently occupied rooms that share living facilities, like bathrooms and kitchens.

In this issue

• Landonomics™
• City of Yes turns One. How’d it do?
• REBNY’s New Building Construction Pipeline Report
• NYC Construction Outlook Report from New York Building Congress
• The Land Lending Landscape

Landonomics™

When it comes to politics & policy, I consider myself a Landonomist™, a term I coined, which defines a person that is politically agnostic and instead focused on the economics and impacts of policies on tax abatements, property taxes, land use, air rights, development, zoning, housing, safety and property. This framework is what I call Landonomics™, applied within New York's broader Landonomy™
From time to time, I hope to add real value to the readers of this report by opining on proposals that will shape development in our great city; and I'll continue to also put forward my own solutions from my Landonomist™ playbook.

A prediction:
Under a Mayor Mamdani administration which begins next month, I believe even further significant zoning  & land use changes are coming to New York City between 2026 and 2030. And I expect them to be bold. This is in order to address the housing shortage this city is facing.

In a recent telling interview the mayor-elect had with NBC news about his meeting with President Trump, specifically as it pertains to the housing affordability crisis in NYC:
"When the President and I were speaking, we were speaking about what is preventing us from delivering on that (housing) affordability agenda.  Sometimes it's a lack of taking on the broken system that we have, and I spoke about in NYC for example: zoning regulations.
We spoke about ULURP, this is a process by which we either approve or deny zoning changes that are made in NYC.  We spoke about the need to change so many of those situations, such that a developer doesn't tell you that thing more expensive than labor or materials is waiting."  -NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani

City of Yes’ First Year

City of Yes was approved on Dec 5, 2024. It’s goal was to deliver more housing across NYC.

Here is the 1-year scoreboard:

The city reported over 23% more new homes permitted in 2025 vs. 2024.

On the ground, 100+ projects applied for the Universal Affordability Preference (about 5,400 homes, including ~900 affordable at an average 60% AMI), new R11/R12 districts are already mapped in Midtown South to enable ~9,500 homes (2,800 affordable), and office conversions are showing 12,000+ homes in the pipeline (3,000+ affordable).

A deeper dive:

Universal Affordability Preference: Over 100 housing developments across the five boroughs have already applied to use the Universal Affordability Preference, which allows buildings in medium- and high-density parts of the city to add at least 20 percent more housing if the additional homes are permanently affordable. These projects are expected to deliver 5,400 new homes, of which approximately 900 would be affordable to households at an average 60 percent Area Median Income.

High-density zoning districts: New, higher-density R11 and R12 zoning districts created through City of Yes have been mapped in Mayor Adams’ Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan that the City Council approved in August, where they will deliver 9,500 new homes, including 2,800 permanently income-restricted affordable homes. These new zoning districts are also being proposed at the site of the future 125th Street Second Avenue Subway station and at 395 Flatbush Avenue Extension in Downtown Brooklyn, which are currently in public review, where they could deliver another 1,800 new homes.

Reduced parking mandates: Rolled-back requirements for off-street parking are also helping to deliver more housing near transit. For example:

• At 2060 Walton Avenue in the Bronx, an underused lot close to the 4, B, and D trains is being transformed into 94 new homes — without the 25 parking spots that had previously been required, a change that meaningfully lowers building costs.
• At 21 Freeman Street in Brooklyn, a vacant lot close to the G train is set to become over 500 new homes without the 140 parking spaces that would have been required prior to City of Yes.

Meanwhile, as envisioned, new housing in less transit-accessible areas continues to include parking.

Office-to-residential conversions: Together with the 467-M tax incentive — which the Adams administration successfully advocated for in Albany — City of Yes has supported a boom of office-to-residential conversion projects. There are more than 12,000 homes in the pipeline from office conversions, including more than 3,000 permanently affordable units.

Landmark Transferable Development Rights: In the last year, five landmarked buildings have begun seeking approval to transfer their development rights to nearby housing projects through a process that was streamlined and expanded by City of Yes. These transfers will enable over 400,000 square feet of new development, while bringing in additional revenue to support maintenance of landmarked buildings. Those five applications in less than one year compare to a total of 15 applications over more than 50 years before City of Yes.

Accessory Dwelling Units: So far this year, the New York City Department of Buildings has received 98 filings from homeowners in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island, seeking to construct ADUs on their properties. Half of these filings have come in just the past two months, since the city finalized rules for safe, code-compliant ADUs and launched the “ADU for You” homeowner assistance program. ADUs like backyard cottages, garage conversions, and basement apartments are a proven tool to support homeowners and expand housing choice in lower-density areas without a changing neighborhood’s look-and-feel.

REBNY’s New Building Construction Pipeline Report

REBNY Research just shared its Q3 2025 New Building Construction Pipeline Report

Some of their findings:
🏗️ New Building Filings: 507 - 56% increase YOY
🏗️ Proposed SF: 17,800,000 SF (11.4m sf is multifamily dev)- 162% increase from Q3 '24
🏗️ Proposed Dwelling Units: 11,746 across 207 buildings - 69% increase from last quarter
🏗️ Of the 207 proposed buildings:
▪️ Under 50 Units: 133 Buildings
▪️ 50-99 Units: 61 Buildings (21 of these are 99-Units)
▪️ 100-149 Units: 2 Buildings
▪️ 150 Units and above: 11 Buildings
🏗️ Queens had the most new building job application filings of all the boroughs at 174. Meanwhile, Manhattan had the fewest filings with only 25.
🏗️ Queens recorded the highest number of proposed multifamily housing units in Q3 2025, with 4,311 units across 48 properties.

New York Building Congress: 2025-2027 New York City Construction Outlook Report

The New York Building Congress just released its 2025-2027 NYC Construction Outlook Report

Some of their findings:

• Total NYC construction spending is projected at $74.1B (2025), $73.1B (2026), and $83.1B (2027), about $230B total over the three years.
• Residential construction spending is projected at $31.6B (2025), $32.3B (2026), $38.4B (2027).
• Residential construction share of total spending is projected at 43% in 2025 (up from 24% the prior year).
• Non-residential construction spending is projected at $18.7B (2025), $18.4B (2026), $18.4B (2027).
• Government is projected at $23.7B (2025), $22.4B (2026), $26.4B (2027).
• Approximately 19,000 housing units are projected to be permitted in 2025.
• Construction cost per unit has risen from about $120,500 (2020) to about $179,000 (2025).
• Residential construction spending averaged about $600/SF, with renovations/alterations and conversions playing a major role.
• Private construction employment is projected at roughly 139,000 jobs (2025) and about 140,000 jobs (2026–2027).
• Floorspace constructed is projected at about 49.8M GSF (2025), 55.0M GSF (2026), and 66.0M GSF (2027), with most 2025 floorspace tied to residential work.

The Lending Landscape

SOFR, The Secured Overnight Financing Rate today it is at 3.67%. Now consistently under 4%. This is the lowest number we have seen since switching over to SOFR from LIBOR in June of 2023 when SOFR was 5%. This will impact construction loan lending. For example if a lender is looking for 400 or 500 over SOFR, the rate would now be 7.67% to 8.67%

Fed funds rate is 3.5% to 3.75%. The lowest since October 2022.

The Prime Rate has now dropped to 6.75%. This is the first drop under 7% since September 2022.

The 10-Year Treasury Rate is at 4.167%, the 5-Year is at 3.716% and the 2-Year is at 3.502% Today a 30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rate Average sits at 6.27%