Every directory in this network starts the same way: take a city, break it into neighborhoods, sort the buildings into them. Chicago came out to twelve neighborhoods. Dallas, fifteen. It is the least glamorous step and normally the easiest.
New York is where that step stops being easy, and it is worth explaining why, because the reason is more interesting than it sounds.
New York City has no official list of neighborhoods. Not a gap in our research. The city does not maintain one, no agency certifies boundaries, and no two sources you consult will fully agree. That is the actual condition of the thing.
So here is how the city is really put together, from the parts that are fixed down to the parts that are argued about in listings.
Start with what is fixed: five boroughs
The boroughs are solid ground. Their boundaries are legal, unambiguous, and unchanged since 1898.
| Borough | County | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Brooklyn | Kings County | 2,736,074 |
| Queens | Queens County | 2,405,464 |
| Manhattan | New York County | 1,694,251 |
| The Bronx | Bronx County | 1,472,654 |
| Staten Island | Richmond County | 495,747 |
| New York City | — | 8,804,190 |
That second column trips people up constantly. Each borough is also a New York State county, a leftover from the 1898 consolidation that merged five separate places into one city. It is why your lease, your deed, and any court filing will say Kings County when you live in Brooklyn, and New York County when you live in Manhattan. The borough is the civic identity; the county is the legal one. Same lines, two names.
Note the ranking too, because it upends the mental image most people carry. Brooklyn is the largest borough by population. Queens is second. Manhattan — the part of the city everyone pictures when they hear “New York” — is third, and holds under a fifth of the city.
Below the borough, the ground goes soft
There is no legal definition of a New York neighborhood. Neighborhoods are informal. They overlap, they contradict, their edges move, and the movement is not random — it follows money. When a district becomes desirable, the listings on its border quietly reclassify themselves into it.
This is not a quirk to be tidied away. It is the thing itself. Any list of New York neighborhoods, including the one we will eventually publish, is an opinion with reasoning behind it.
The city’s best attempt: 262 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas
The Department of City Planning needed neighborhood-level statistics, and to get them it had to invent neighborhoods. The result is the NTA — Neighborhood Tabulation Area — built by aggregating whole census tracts into units meant to approximate the neighborhood names New Yorkers actually use.
As of the 2020 revision there are 262 of them. Here is how they fall across the boroughs:
| Borough | NTAs |
|---|---|
| Queens | 82 |
| Brooklyn | 69 |
| The Bronx | 50 |
| Manhattan | 38 |
| Staten Island | 23 |
| Total | 262 |
Queens has the most by a wide margin, which surprises almost everyone and should not. It is the most ethnically diverse county in the United States, and its neighborhoods are numerous, distinct, and strongly identified. Manhattan has 38.
One wrinkle worth knowing before you go looking at this data: only 197 of the 262 are residential. The other 65 are places where nobody lives — 40 parks, 14 cemeteries, and a handful of airports, institutional campuses and islands. Prospect Park is an NTA. So are Green-Wood Cemetery, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Hart Island. If you ever pull the NTA file and wonder why your neighborhood count is inflated, that is why.
Three other official maps, none of which means what you mean
59 Community Districts
These are real administrative units, unique to New York, each with a community board that weighs in on land use, liquor licenses and the local budget. They are the most politically consequential geography on this list. They are also large — each contains several neighborhoods — so “Brooklyn Community District 6” is not an answer to “where do you live.”
55 PUMAs
Public Use Microdata Areas, a Census Bureau construct that approximates community districts for statistical purposes. Useful for demographers. Meaningless in conversation.
ZIP codes
ZIP codes are postal delivery routes. They were designed to move mail efficiently, not to describe places, and they cut across neighborhood lines without caring. A ZIP code is never a neighborhood, and any site that treats one as the other will mislead you eventually.
And then the map real estate actually uses
Running alongside every official geography is the one brokers use, and it obeys different rules.
A number of the names you think of as historic are marketing inventions, and recent ones. SoHo is South of Houston. TriBeCa is the Triangle Below Canal. DUMBO is Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. NoMad is North of Madison Square Park. These were coined to make districts sellable, and they worked so completely that they now read as though they had always been there.
The live version of the same process is boundary drift. The desirable neighborhood expands in listings until it meets resistance. Blocks that were unambiguously one thing become the edge of something more expensive.
When a listing names a neighborhood, read the cross streets instead. The intersection is a fact. The label is a claim.
So what are we going to do
Our approach for the New York index, stated plainly so you can disagree with it:
Start from the 262 NTAs as a spine, because they are transparent, built from real census geography, and revised on a public schedule. Then adjust toward how renters actually speak — merging where the city splits something nobody splits, separating where a single NTA contains two places that no local would confuse. Keep the names people actually search for, including the broker coinages, because a directory that refuses to say SoHo is a directory nobody finds.
The test for every entry is simple: would a person standing on that block say this word?
A beginner’s orientation
If you are new to the city, here is the rough shape of where renters actually look, borough by borough. This is orientation, not a complete list.
Manhattan
Below 14th Street: the Village, SoHo, TriBeCa, the Lower East Side, the Financial District. Midtown: Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, Murray Hill, Gramercy. The park-flanking Upper West Side and Upper East Side. Then uptown — Harlem, Morningside Heights, Washington Heights and Inwood at the northern tip, where the island gets hilly and the rents fall.
Brooklyn
The brownstone belt runs from Brooklyn Heights through Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Park Slope. North Brooklyn is Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick. Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene sit in the middle. Further out: Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, and the enormous southern half of the borough that visitors never see.
Queens
Long Island City and Astoria face Manhattan across the East River and behave, rent-wise, almost like it. Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Sunnyside are the dense, diverse core. Forest Hills and Rego Park sit in the middle. Flushing is a major center in its own right. The Rockaways are an actual beach, an hour out.
The Bronx
Mott Haven and the South Bronx are closest to Manhattan and changing fastest. Riverdale in the northwest is leafy and low-rise. Fordham, Belmont, Pelham Bay and Throgs Neck fill out the rest. The borough holds the city’s largest park and its zoo.
Staten Island
The North Shore around St. George is the dense part and the ferry landing. Mid-Island and the South Shore are suburban in a way no other borough is — detached houses, driveways, cars.
So how many neighborhoods does New York have?
There is no correct answer. The city counts 262 tabulation areas, 197 of them residential. Common usage runs past 300. Ask ten New Yorkers and you will get ten lists, all defensible, none matching.
That is the project we are taking on, and the reason New York is the last of our nine markets rather than the first. We would rather take the time and publish something a person recognizes than publish a fast list that is wrong in three hundred small ways.
Related reading
- What New York landlords require: income, guarantors and documents — The 40x rule, guarantors at 80x, the FARE Act, and the folder to have ready.
- NYC apartment listing terms, decoded — Junior 4, classic six, flex, railroad, prewar, no-fee — term by term.
- Renting in New York with a dog: weight limits, fees and the pet law — Why pet deposits are illegal, why pet rent usually is not, and what the 90-day pet law covers.
- Browse buildings by location — Search the directory by building name or address, or see the whole index on a map.
- Apartment hunting in New York vs Chicago — Why New York rents the apartment and Chicago rents the building.