Here's a link with some more data https://streeteasy.com/blog/nycs-unsold-condos/.

The rezoning and redevelopment of the queens and brooklyn waterfronts brought a ton of new high rise condos with it. I live in northern brooklyn and there's a new condo building being built on almost every block. At the same time there's more vacant storefronts than I've ever seen and the only businesses getting by are coffee shops, hair salons and trendy modern american restaurants that charge $18 for burgers and fries.

If that’s not making enough of a dent, it’s not evidence that it’s not helping at all.

Compared to CA, NYC is building like crazy from my anecdotal observation.

Your article talks about 16k condos over 6y, which is ~3k/y. That's not zero, but that's really not very much housing compared to the ~8M population of NYC. I know this isn't the total of New York housing construction, but it's so little you wouldn't expect it to help much.

For example, during the 1920s NYC was building housing at about 7%/y! Housing was much cheaper then, and through the period of low demand, but when demand picked up again we didn't let people resume building at anywhere near historical rates.

I found total construction numbers: ~25k new units in 2017, depending on how you count (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/18HSR.pd...)

That's only about 0.3% housing growth.

Sorry, I used 8M people as the denominator for growth instead of 3.5M units, so it's more like 0.7%

Expanded this into a post: https://www.jefftk.com/p/is-nyc-building-much-housing

The storefronts are only there because of significant state tax credits for including them.

Like all things real estate, there’s some other tax angle where the owners make more money demanding commercial rents above what the market can afford than actually renting it. They probably securitize the losses somehow.