Workers on a construction site | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images State orders halt to nonessential construction

The state will halt “non-essential” construction work in light of the growing coronavirus pandemic, according to new guidelines posted Friday.

The order from Empire State Development will temporarily suspend a wide swath of residential and commercial construction, while allowing some work deemed necessary — like building hospitals, infrastructure projects, affordable housing and homeless shelters — to continue. Nonessential construction work may continue in certain emergency circumstances, such as continuing a project if it would be unsafe to allow it to remain undone, the guidelines said.


“Anything that is not directly part of the essential work of fighting coronavirus and the essential work of keeping the city running and the state running, and any construction that is not about the public good, is going to end,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said during his weekly radio appearance on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show. “So luxury condos will not be built until this is over, office buildings are not going to be built.”

The new restrictions follow a wide-ranging order from Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week that deemed all construction “essential” — spurring pushback from elected officials and workers who had to report as usual to job sites around the city while the in-person operations of numerous other industries were halted.

All construction was required to follow social distancing guidelines, though critics said these measures were all but impossible to enforce on many job sites. Those requirements will continue to apply to essential construction.

“I think you’re right this was one of the pieces that wasn’t being addressed, and you know, in the rush of things you understand some things get missed in the first instance,” de Blasio said in response to a question from a construction worker during the interview.

Positive cases of the coronavirus were reported at some construction sites, and work at some of them was permitted to continue despite that.