Do Trees Grow in New York City? Yes, Says a New Plan

A new “urban forest” plan for New York City was just unveiled by the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (MOCEJ). The new plan, created by architectural and design firm WXY, is designed to keep temperatures in the city from rising as global warming spreads but also to counteract historic inequities in lower-income neighborhoods. […]

What It’s Like Living in Mass Timber in Brooklyn

After opening last year as New York City’s first mass timber structure, residents are settling into a new environment. The experience of living in the city’s first mass timber structure is driving a robust and growing conversation among current and future residents that is likely to impact future such developments. With that in mind, Metropolis, […]

New York City Gets Its First Completed Mass Timber Structure

Much of the rest of the country has been into mass timber for years but now the nation’s largest city is in the game too. It took the 2022 New York City Building Code to formally recognize CLT (cross-laminated timber) as a permitted building material but now a five-story apartment building in the Clinton Hill […]

New York State’s New Builder-Friendly Laws Could Be Model for Other States

They are not yet law, but a series of new legislations in New York State is designed to spur residential construction by builders. New York State is not always considered the most typical in the country, especially when it comes to what some view as archaic rules and regulations, particularly in building and development. But […]

Living Timber Is the Latest Building Material

The building materials business has moved to its latest iteration: using live trees in new building construction. Using wood in building new structures may be far more sustainable than other materials but there’s no getting around the fact that the trees that supply the wood still have to be harvested… until now. Terreform One, a […]

New York City New Building Filings Hit Record High

New York City is sometimes an outlier to the rest of the nation but a record number of new building filings is good news for the whole country. New construction permits for New York City for the fourth quarter of 2023 represented the highest quarterly tally for the 2020s decade so far, according to just-released […]