New York’s 10 most affordable neighborhoods of 2019

By Zoe Rosenberg@zoe_rosenberg Oct 25, 2019, 10:00am EDT
A skyline New York view from Brooklyn looking towards Manhattan as the sun sets.
New York, glorious and expensive. Max Touhey

The city has seen residential sales prices soar over the last decade, with the number of neighborhoods netting a median recorded sales price of $1 million or higher jumping from four in 2010 to 17 in 2019. This is the state of New York real estate, particularly in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and western Queens. But farther afield, median sales prices still linger below the $500,000 mark.

Real estate listings platform PropertyClub went to task determining the city’s 50 most affordable neighborhoods of 2019, using residential sales data recorded with the Department of Finance from January through September.

It found that the neighborhood with the lowest median sales price in that period of time was the Bronx’s Parkchester, a 129-acre planned community by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company—who was also behind Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town—where the year’s 233 sales had a median cost of $180,000.

Hammels, a small Queens enclave of Rockaway Beach just west of Arverne By the Sea, had the second lowest median sales price of the year at $275,000, nearly $100,000 more than Parkchester’s. (It should be noted that only 23 condos, co-ops, single- and two-family homes, the only kinds of residential dwellings accounted for in the study, traded in the time period accounted for.)

The full list of neighborhoods can be found here, with the ten neighborhoods claiming the year’s lowest median sales prices below:
The 10 Most Affordable Neighborhoods in NYC
Rank Neighborhood Borough Median Sale Price Number of Sales
1 Parkchester Bronx $180,000 233
2 Hammels Queens $275,000 23
3 Port Ivory Staten Island $362,228 32
4 New Brighton Staten Island $365,000 34
5 Howard Beach Queens $387,795 76
6 Mariners Harbor Staten Island $399,000 75
7 Concord Staten Island $401,171 20
8 Kew Gardens Queens $402,800 63
9 Travis Staten Island $405,000 27
10 Cambria Heights Queens $415,000 37
PropertyClub

Not a single neighborhood in Manhattan made it onto the list, somewhat unsurprisingly, but the smallest borough appears in a major way on a companion study PropertyClub conducted of the city’s 50 most affordable residential streets in 2019, claiming 19 spots on the list. A caveat: only streets with 20 or more sales from January 2019 through September 2019 were considered.

Claiming the number 4 spot on the list is Manhattan’s West 107th Street, where 21 sales in 2019 had a median price of $204,765. Manhattan’s Manhattan Avenue followed in the fifth spot, with a median price for 21 sales of $261,721.

The three streets claiming the top spots on the list are all located in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx, with Unionport Road topping the list with a median sales price of $170,000 and Metropolitan Avenue and Metropolitan Oval following with median sales prices of $173,500 and $180,000, respectively.

For the full breakdown of the city streets with the lowest median sales price this year, head right this way.