On February 10, 2006, HPD released the initial results of the 2005 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS).   The 2005 HVS shows that the City’s total inventory of residential units was 3.3 million, the largest housing stock in the forty-year period since the first HVS was conducted in 1965.  New York City’s housing stock increased by 52,000 between 2002 and 2005, the largest increase since 1991.    

The 2005 HVS finds that the number of vacant rental units in New York City was 64,737 and therefore the citywide rental vacancy rate was 3.09 percent during the period between February and June 2005.  While the Survey shows a strong increase in the City’s housing stock, the vacancy rate is significantly lower than the 5-percent threshold mandated by State and City laws to justify the continuation of rent control and rent stabilization.

The number of rent-stabilized units was 1,042,397 in 2002 and it was 1,043,677 in 2005. Mayor Bloomberg’s housing plan is successfully replacing units lost through luxury decontrol with rent stabilized units for low- and middle- income families. The HVS also reports that the homeownership rate in the City was 33.3 percent in 2005, an all-time high for the forty-year period since 1965, and that neighborhood conditions were the best since the HVS started covering them. 

For 27 years, the HVS has covered neighborhood satisfaction. The 2005 report shows that neighborhood satisfaction is the best on record.  The proportion of renter households near buildings with broken or boarded-up windows on the same street was a mere 6.3 percent in 2005, a 2.4-percentage point improvement from 2002, and the best in the 27-year period since 1978, when the HVS started to measure neighborhood condition.

The HVS is a comprehensive housing market survey required every three years by State and City rent-regulation laws and is designed to determine New York City’s overall vacancy rate for rental housing. The comprehensive final report on the 2005 HVS will be released by HPD in 2007.

The Census Bureau is currently re-weighting and testing data from the 1991, 1993, 1996, and 1999 HVSs to determine if the data is comparable with 2002 and 2005 HVS data so that we may analyze changes in New York City's housing market over the last decade.