The same week City Hall said New York needs 700,000 new homes over the next decade, The Real Deal reported a developer is planning to build not one big tower in Downtown Brooklyn, but three separate buildings — each capped at 99 units.

That number isn't an accident. It's the ceiling under 485-x, the tax abatement that replaced 421-a and carries its own wage floor for construction workers once a building hits 100 units or more. Stay at 99, and you dodge the stronger wage requirement. Commercial Observer laid out the pattern the same week: 485-x is teaching developers across the city to build in chunks just under the line, not over it.

The Real Deal's report doesn't name the developer or give an exact address beyond Downtown Brooklyn — check their full piece for those specifics — but the shape of the deal is the story: three buildings instead of one bigger one, sized to stay out of the higher wage tier.

Here's what that means if you're bidding residential work in this city for the next few years: the pipeline behind that 700,000-unit number — reported this same week by Gothamist, the New York Post, Brooklyn Eagle, and others, all citing the city's own housing agency — isn't shaping up as a handful of supertall towers. It's shaping up as a lot of buildings sized right at 99 units, each one its own permit, its own bid package, its own super.

That's good news if you're a small-to-mid shop that's been locked out of the big union towers — there's about to be a lot more work sized for you. It's a different conversation if you were counting on fewer, bigger jobs to keep a bigger crew busy.

What to do now: start watching DOB permit filings for clusters of applications landing at 90 to 99 units in your borough. That's the real shape of the housing push — not the topline number sitting in a press release.