1 in 4 NYC IT pros live in Brooklyn, with just 7% of the jobs [report]

Nearly one in four of all IT professionals employed at firms in New York City live in Brooklyn, according to a new report by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, but just seven percent of all IT jobs are here, though that number is growing.

Zoning turns out to be a powerful force in New York City, and the report argues that Mayor Bloomberg’s 2004 Downtown Brooklyn Plan, which opened up millions of square feet of office space, was a key first step in growing a new economy here. The decentralized nature of the Internet and lower office rent across the East River led to powerful incentives to locate companies here. Plus, tables later in the report show that lots of the IT professionals already live here, and everyone likes to live near work.

Here are a few other takeaways from the report:

• For all it’s growth, the Chamber estimates that IT employment in Brooklyn is only 7 percent of all the IT employment in New York City. This falls in line with Aaron Shapiro‘s observation at the Tech Triangle U keynote that there are probably still more engineers working on Wall Street than there are in the whole Brooklyn tech scene. The big companies are doing their best to grow that share though.
• The report echoes our observation that IT employment is moving deeper into the borough, citing nodes of employment in Prospect Heights, Williamsburg, Greenpoint and even small pockets in Midwood and Manhattan Beach (the last is the only neighborhood on the list where Technically Brooklyn has not yet covered at least one company).
• IT workers disproportionately live in Brooklyn. 24 percent of all IT workers at New York companies, both at tech and non-tech organizations, live in Brooklyn, beating each of the other boroughs and New York’s suburbs.
• There were 7,432 people employed in the IT economy here, as of 2012, up from less than 4,773 in 2005