GoKawiilThe landscape of NYC changes so much that the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation updates a dataset of building footprint shapes weekly.
Visualization: Jon Keegan / Beautiful Public Data. Data: New York City Office of Technology and Innovation
I can't believe this is the first time I am writing about an NYC dataset.
The scale of New York City can be overwhelming. Over 8.5 million people are estimated to live in the five boroughs of NYC, squished into 300 square miles , making it the most densely populated major city in the US.
All of those people live and work in buildings of vastly different sizes and shapes — soaring skyscrapers, 200-year-old brownstones, single-story houses, and everything in between. As of July 13, 2026, there are 1,082,974 buildings that New York City tracks. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in NYC knows that the city is under a permanent state of construction, and demolition — massive new buildings just pop up out of nowhere all the time.
The pace of change is so rapid in fact, that the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) publishes weekly updates to one of its most fascinating datasets – the footprints of every building in New York City . The OTI says that its accurate basemap provides “the foundation upon which virtually all other geospatial data within New York City government is registered.”
The bare shapes of the building footprints in the dataset. Data: New York City Office of Technology and Innovation
What’s included in this data?
Like I said — this dataset has all buildings in NYC. The OTI says it counts every building greater than 400 square feet, and taller than 12 feet. The items that aren’t counted: temporary trailers, tents, movable jet bridges, awnings, scaffolds, sidewalk sheds, and any backyard storage sheds.
Clockwise from top left: Red Hook and Sunset Park, Brooklyn; Rikers Island; Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens; Randalls and Wards Islands, Manhattan. Visualizations: Jon Keegan / Beautiful Public Data. Data: New York City Office of Technology and Innovation
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