The Concrete Index.
About

Why The Concrete Index exists.

Brooklyn Bridge · Unsplash
Salar Jalinous
Salar Jalinous
Contract surety underwriter,
Liberty Mutual Surety

The mission

The data behind public construction is public in name only. Award notices sit in one system, capital budgets in another, payments in a third, and none of them were built to be read together. The agencies that fund work, the contractors who build it, the brokers and underwriters who stand behind it, and the analysts who measure it all make decisions about the same market, usually with different, partial views of it.

The Concrete Index exists to close that gap. Every figure on this site comes from the public record, normalized and read the same way for everyone: what's funded, what's bidding, what's awarded, and what's actually being paid. When everyone prices against the same picture of demand, bids get sharper, bonding and credit decisions rest on evidence instead of anecdote, and capital finds the work earlier.

As a contract surety underwriter, my work is judging whether contractors can deliver the projects they take on. This site is the demand side of that question, built in the open, for anyone who shares it.

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What this site actually does

The Concrete Index is a live reading of New York City's public construction market, built directly on the government's own records. Nothing here is estimated or scraped. Each page queries the official datasets at the moment you load it, runs the numbers in your browser, and renders the result. There is no database to go stale and no analyst refresh to wait for.

1 · Pull
Each page queries the City Record, the OMB capital plan, the SCA construction roster, and the MTA capital dashboard through their Socrata APIs, with server-side SoQL aggregation doing the heavy lifting before a single row reaches your browser.
2 · Normalize
Raw records are messy. Sub-projects duplicate, renewals hide among new awards, budgets repeat across rows, and agencies go by five names. One disclosed rule set fixes that: project rows collapse on an agency-plus-FMS-ID key, continuations are flagged by selection method, and $500M megaprojects can be set aside so a single award doesn't bend a trend.
3 · Read
From the cleaned data the site computes the demand funnel from commitment to cash, phase-conversion rates by agency, a composite index back to 2004, and a briefing that rewrites itself from the live record on every visit.

Who it's for

Contractors see what's bidding now and which agencies are putting work into the market, before it shows up in a backlog conversation.
Brokers & agents see where their clients' next bonding needs are forming, by agency, borough, and category.
Underwriters & credit analysts see the demand side of contractor health: how much funded work is stacked upstream and how fast it converts to revenue.
Analysts & investors get a public-market read on one of the country's largest construction economies, with the methodology in the open.