The footprints of every building in NYC

Visualization: Jon Keegan / Beautiful Public Data. Data: New York City Office of Technology and InnovationI 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…