NYC still plagued by stalled construction sites

A piece of construction safety netting blows in the wind while hanging off a building in the Brooklyn borough of New York October 28, 2010.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Many stalled construction sites plague New York City's economy, a legacy of the credit crunch, though the latest data for October show the number has fallen 8 percent from a year ago, a report said on Wednesday.

An average of 638 construction sites had stalled in October compared with 693 in October 2010, depriving construction workers of potential jobs and New York City of revenue from taxes on payrolls and the sales of building materials.

Those sites was estimated to have a total market value of $1.3 billion, according to the study by the New York Building Congress, a trade group.

A stalled site is one where the developers control the land and have construction permits but have halted work, according to the study.

The record high was set in November 2010, when there were 709 stalled sites throughout the city. That record was nearly double the number of inactive sites seen in October 2009, when 454 locations had been idled.

Most of the stalled projects, 62 percent, are residential.

Brooklyn has the most stalled sites at 299, followed by Queens with 131, and Manhattan with 126. On Staten Island, there are 52 such sites while the Bronx has 30.

The average number of idled sites in the five boroughs has either fallen or remained steady in each of the past 11 months, the report said. That is an improvement from the previous 11 months, when the number of stalled sites rose each month.

"It is encouraging to see that we have stemmed the flow of stalled sites and that at least a portion of these projects are moving once again," New York Building Congress President Richard Anderson said in a statement.

(Reporting by Joan Gralla; Editing by Jan Paschal)