Northeast

Demand for multifamily housing remains robust in the Northeast’s major cities, including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

The City of New York recently proposed eliminating parking minimums for new housing across the city, hoping to make it easier to build the estimated one million homes the city needs to stay affordable. Converting offices into apartments is challenging due to unsuitable floorplates, necessitating costly modifications. As commercial real estate values plummet—a property sold in March at a 97% loss—demolitions and rebuilds may become more feasible.

Major infrastructure projects are underway, spurred by federal funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Key projects include bridge rehabilitations in Pennsylvania and New York, rail improvements along the Northeast Corridor, and renewable energy infrastructure such as offshore wind projects in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Nationwide, the country faces an estimated shortfall of approximately 3 million homes. Roughly 1 million of these are in the area around New York City, where housing shortages are more pronounced than anywhere outside of California. Much of the residential construction over the last few years has been high-end luxury developments that are not meant to be widely affordable. Below, we have provided more detail about the state of the market in the Northeast.

* Other structures include religious buildings, amusement, government communications, and public recreation projects.