Thanks to New York’s open-data policy, you can get access to a lot of city databases online. For example, the Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output is available here: PLUTO. Pluto brings together in one spot a lot of different information about the built environment of the city: not just physical characteristics of buildings, but also zoning and city-agency districts. The building data includes geometry, use, and value, among other data points. The data, viewed as a spreadsheet, has well over a million rows and over one hundred columns.
You might think that a database of measurable, quantifiable values would be complete and unambiguous, but that’s unfortunately not quite true. It’s as complete and unambiguous as the people working for the various city agencies that provide data can make it, but for several reasons it’s always going to be a little fuzzy. The first reason is the simplest and most obvious: people keep changing things. Buildings are built, demolished, altered, change use… No static set of data will ever be perfectly up to date.
The second reason is far more frustrating: there is no single definition of how many buildings there are in the city. Do the garages of single-family houses count? A few years ago, I would have said that I don’t know for sure, but lean towards “no.” Now that the City of Yes legislation has made it easier to convert them to secondary residences on a given lot, I lean towards “yes.” There are multi-wing buildings constructed over long periods of time that can be counted as groups of buildings or single buildings depending on your mood.
It gets worse when you look at lots. Addresses are rather changeable, but surely if you identify a location by block and lot you’ve got it, right? Except that there are many lots with multiple buildings, lots can be merged or broken up over time, and some block numbers repeat in every borough but the Bronx, where they were always an extension of the Manhattan numbering system. The closest to a unique identified is the BBL system – a concatenation of the borough number, block number, and lot number – but that still leaves the multiple-buildings on a lot problem unaddressed.
In one sense, it’s maddening. We’re talking about physical reality – things that can be touched, seen, and measured – so it seems like it should be easy to have an exact accounting. On the other hand, it’s a big and messy city with a complex physical environment, a complex history, and a chaotic building culture. You can always track down the specifics of a single building or lot when you need to. What you can’t readily do is automate looking at the whole picture.
You must be logged in to post a comment.