Lines the New York City government controlsFigures as of · Methodology · Checks · Gaps

The Waiting City

The waits the city reports run from six minutes at a licensing counter to 659 days for a zoning review.

How many New Yorkers are standing in a line the city controls, and how long each line is. There is no grand total, because the units don't add: a household on a waiting list, an application in a queue and a repair on a work order are different things.

Each dot is one line, placed by its reported wait, on a log scale.

What each line measures

One square per line. Agencies report waiting in four different ways, and only the first can be put on a clock. That is why there is no grand total.

The longest waits

Mean or median, whichever the agency reports. The swatch is the agency's group from the chart above. Select a line to open its record.

Sources: Mayor's Management Report indicators, agency releases and testimony, Comptroller audits, NYU Furman Center, NYC Open Data record-level files · How the counting works

What the record shows

Every figure below is also a line in the registry; click through for its definition, period and source.

Select a line.

A line, for this project, is a set of people (or households, applications, cases or objects) who have formally asked a government body for a specific thing, have been accepted into a waiting state and have not yet received either the thing or a final decision. Definitions, measurement types and grades · Thirteen lines with no public count, and defects in the sources themselves · Four blind fact-check passes · Registry data (JSON) · Code and sources

Everything substantive (the concept, which lines to include, how to define and grade them, what the page should show) was decided by the author, a human. The coding, the data pulls and the file work were done by Anthropic's Claude and Claude Code under the author's direction. The author insisted on quality controls: every figure carries a verbatim quote from its source and a local copy of the document or the exact query; every Mayor's Management Report figure was re-queried by name and compared; and four separate fact-checkers, each blind to the registry's values and to the earlier checks, re-extracted every figure and compared each line's description against the agency's own definition text, word by word. Those passes found and corrected 41 definition errors; the fourth, on the fiscal 2026 report released Sept. 17, 2026, agreed on 68 of 69 figures and caught the one indicator the city renamed. The risks of using AI remain, and the author would be grateful to hear of any red flags in what is presented.

Josh Greenman · The Waiting City · Registry built .