Twelve thousand one hundred eighty-two construction permits got filed across the five boroughs in the last 30 days, and if you only looked at the count, you'd think Manhattan and Brooklyn were running neck and neck — 4,411 permits in Manhattan against 3,411 in Brooklyn. Look at the dollars instead and the race isn't close.

Manhattan's permits carry $2.1 billion in declared construction cost. Brooklyn's carry $517 million. Queens comes in at $448 million, the Bronx at $531 million, and Staten Island — with a fifth of Manhattan's permit count — brings up the rear at $51 million. Manhattan is pulling 36% of the city's permits and better than half its declared dollars.

“Three out of every four permits pulled this month were somebody improving a building that already exists — not building a new one.”

Here's the number that breaks the pattern, though: the single biggest filing in the whole 30-day window isn't in Manhattan at all. It's a $200 million alteration on Waters Place in the Bronx, filed under owner 'PR' — no named entity, which is its own small mystery. That one filing is nearly 40% of the Bronx's entire 30-day permit dollar total by itself, and it's bigger than every other filing on the top-ten list except nothing, because it's also the largest permit in the city this month, full stop.

The rest of the top ten reads like a Lower Manhattan finance-district tour: Broadway at $82 million, Broad Street at $67.75 million, 1 Avenue at $66 million, Gouverneur Lane at $65 million, Water Street at $57.5 million — five alteration filings inside a few blocks of each other, all Alteration or Alteration CO, meaning owners upgrading buildings that already exist rather than starting from dirt. New Building filings account for only 1,475 of the month's 12,182 permits; Alteration alone accounts for 8,893 — nearly three out of every four permits pulled this month were somebody improving a building that's already standing, not building a new one.

If you're a GC or sub bidding retrofit, systems, or interior work, that Alteration share is the whole ballgame right now — new ground-up work is a small minority of what's actually getting permitted. And if you're chasing a piece of that one Bronx filing on Waters Place, you're chasing a project worth more than every permit filed in Staten Island this month combined.