22,000 Housing Units? Sounds Low.

CityRealty, as reported in DNA is estimating that 22,000 new apartments will be built in northern Brooklyn between now and 2019. Northern Brooklyn in this case means Red Hook to Bushwick, and everything in between. Their estimate only includes “large” developments of 20 units or more, so it is necessarily a low estimate.

A really low number – I can count over 11,000 housing units either under construction or soon to be so just along the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront. Close to 6,000 more housing units could potentially be built along this stretch, which runs from Walkabout Inlet/Division Avenue to Newtown Creek.

These numbers don’t even begin to count developments of any size east of Kent Avenue/West Street – this is just looking at the blocks fronting the waterfront and those two streets.

The city estimates that on average each dwelling unit equals 2.2 residents, so if you add these numbers to thousands of new units created during the last two housing booms (almost 19,000 units since 2000), Greenpoint/Williamsburg is looking at a population increase of over 50%.

Don’t Believe the Census

I’ve written in the past about my skepticism regarding the 2010 census when it comes to Brooklyn in general and Williamsburg/Greenpoint in particular. For an illustration of exactly how wack the 2010 census is, look no further the data on new housing units since 2000. Between 2000 and 2009, CB1 (Williamsburg and Greenpoint) added just 11,900 new housing units. In addition to that, about 5,000 housing units were renovated – a number that includes many conversions from non-residential use, and thus a further addition of (legal) housing units. Using the city’s standard EIS methodology and assuming an average of 2.2 people per housing unit (a conservative number historically for CB1), that equates to a population increase of at least 30,000 to 35,000.

The census says we added 12,745 people during that period.