The Waiting City · every line New Yorkers stand inRegistry built · Methodology · Checks · Gaps

The Waiting City

How many New Yorkers are standing in a line the city controls, and how long each line is. Seventy-seven lines, each measured in the agency's own words, each number opening the record it came from. 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.

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

Registry as built · Mayor's Management Report figures are fiscal 2026 to date through March 2026 unless a line says otherwise

What the record showsEvery 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 · Twelve lines with no public count, and defects in the sources themselves · Three 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 three 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 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 .