NEW YORK CITY—The 1,000-foot luxury apartment towers popping up along 57th Street and the adjacent Hudson Yards and Manhattan West mega-projects on the Far West Side provide clear illustrations of where development is already happening in New York City. A panel of experts at last week's RealShare New York charted where it's likely to occur next.

“New York City is in one of its best positions ever,” Seth Pinsky, EVP with RXR Realty, told the RealShare audience. This has led to both higher prices for properties and development parcels and to investors and developers pushing into what were formerly peripheral neighborhoods. It's the result, he added, of “all of this pent-up demand and very little supply.”

Keeping up with the demand has been one of the major challenges for the city's development community. When all of the new office space going up at Manhattan's mega-projects is completed, “we're barely going to have more space than we had 20 years ago,” Pinsky said.

As moderator Wayne D'Amico, CCIM, president and principal of PropertyPolitics.com, summed it up, panelists have been responding to that demand by building for the target audience. The Howard Hughes Corp., for example, is aiming its redevelopment of the South Street Seaport not at Lower Manhattan's booming tourist trade, but at its equally vital residential growth. “We're building the Seaport for New Yorkers,” said Christopher Curry, senior EVP, development with Howard Hughes.

Similarly, Hidrock Properties CEO Abraham Hidary said his company is also capitalizing on the resurgence of Downtown, but in a different way. It's developing in the hospitality sector, which is geared toward both business travel and tourism, both of which have increased in recent years. Muss Development has aimed its retail at specific, neighborhood-level demand drivers, said principal Jason Muss.

Another driver historically for development across the city has been transportation, and Mark Spector, president of the Hudson Yards Development Corp., cited its benefits for the Far West Side. The extension of the No. 7 subway line west from Times Square will encourage office tenants to commit to leases in a neighborhood that will now be served by a transit line, he said. Up until the extension's opening last month, he added, the prospect of making employees take a long walk west from Times Square might have given prospective tenants pause.

Formerly president of the New York City Economic Development Corp. during the Bloomberg administration, Pinsky warned that infrastructure must get its due if future projects are going to be viable. “We have old infrastructure that is creaking under the demand” as it is, he said, adding, “we as a region will not be able to survive if we cannot figure out how to expand our infrastructure” in a cost-effective manner.