How Bunky grades NYC neighborhoods

Grades compare neighborhoods with each other

For each category, a neighborhood’s place in the city-wide ranking becomes a letter from A+ (about the top 7% of the city) to F (the bottom 12%), before residents’ views are added. So an A in Safety means safer than most of New York, not crime free, and an F in Quiet means more noise complaints than most neighborhoods, not that nobody can sleep there. The overall grade ranks a weighted average of the eight categories the same way, weighted for someone moving to the city for a room: Community and Safety count one and a half times, Walkability and Food once, and Nightlife, Parks, Quiet and Building upkeep half. The overall grade never goes below D. An F is kept for single categories, so a quiet neighborhood far from Manhattan with few bars is not graded as a failing place to live. A neighborhood with no data for a category shows a question mark instead of a guess.

What residents say counts too

Numbers miss things people who live there know, like which train line is unreliable or how loud the elevated tracks are. So Bunky reads what residents write in each neighborhood’s Reddit community and records each point about living there: the category, whether it is good or bad news for a renter, whether the person lives there, and a link to the comment. Each point is checked word for word against the original comment before it counts.

Once a category has enough of these (at least 3 separate threads over at least 2 years), residents’ view moves the grade toward theirs. Their view is compared with what residents typically say about neighborhoods with similar numbers: New Yorkers complain about the subway everywhere, so a commute grade moves only when a neighborhood’s residents are happier or unhappier than residents usually are, and a place where residents feel safer than its crime numbers suggest moves up. The more residents there are, the more they move it, up to half the grade. People who live there count more than visitors, the last two years count more than older posts, and one long thread counts as one voice. The page says when residents changed a grade and what the data alone would give.

What gets graded

• Safety. Murders, robberies, felony assaults and burglaries reported to the NYPD in 2025, per 1,000 residents.
• Community. How easy it looks to meet people: the share of households that moved in since 2018, the share living with roommates, the share aged 22 to 34, and the cafes and bars within a 10-minute walk, all from the Census and city data. Residents’ own words on whether neighbors are friendly and whether it is easy to make friends count toward it like any other grade.
• Food and shopping. Places to eat, kinds of cuisine, large grocery stores and open storefronts within a 10-minute walk of the average home.
• Nightlife. Bars, clubs and restaurants licensed to serve alcohol on site within a 10-minute walk.
• Walkability. How many everyday needs (grocery store, restaurant, cafe, subway station, park) are within a 10-minute walk, and how many places there are to eat or shop.
• Quiet. Noise complaints to 311 in 2025 per 1,000 residents, leaving out helicopter complaints and counting each address at most 12 days a year so one caller cannot decide the grade. It counts complaints, not decibels.
• Parks and green space. Parks within a 10-minute walk, acres of parkland nearby and street trees.
• Building upkeep. Serious housing code violations and heat or hot water complaints per 100 rented homes in 2025.

Why the commute is not a grade

How long the trip takes depends on where you are going, so one commute grade would only be right for people who work in Midtown. Instead, each neighborhood’s page has a map shaded by the trip from there to every other neighborhood, by subway or bus, arriving by 9:00 on a weekday, from the MTA’s schedules. The neighborhood list can also sort every neighborhood by the trip to where you work.

Who lives there is a profile, not a grade

Each neighborhood is described by who mostly lives there instead of graded on it: recent grads and young professionals, lots of roommates, college students, young families, families with kids or older residents, as many as fit, or a mix of ages. A label appears where a neighborhood stands out among the guides on the Census American Community Survey (2020 to 2024): its share of residents aged 22 to 34, under 18 or 65 and over, and its share of households of people sharing who are not family. College students means at least one resident in ten is 18 to 21. Each page also shows the age breakdown and what residents say about who lives there.

Where StreetEasy has no figure

StreetEasy’s neighborhood list is coarser than the city’s and covers no part of Staten Island, so some neighborhoods have no asking rent of their own. Where StreetEasy folds a neighborhood into a larger area it does publish (Yorkville into the Upper East Side, Hudson Heights into Washington Heights), the page shows that area’s figure and says so. Elsewhere the page shows an estimate, and says so: the Census median rent of 2-bedroom homes there (2020 to 2024), scaled by how far StreetEasy asking rents run above Census rents across that borough’s neighborhoods that have both (1.71 times in Brooklyn, 2.18 times in Manhattan, 1.48 times in Queens, 1.65 times in The Bronx; Staten Island uses the city-wide 1.71). Across the 108 neighborhoods with both figures, the estimate is typically within about 15% of StreetEasy’s, so treat it as rough.

Why rent is not a grade

Rent is shown in dollars instead: what a room costs when two people split a 2-bedroom, from StreetEasy’s median asking rents for the last three months. A letter would only say whether a place is cheaper than the rest of New York, and the dollar amount tells you whether it fits your budget. Rent does not count toward the overall grade, so a neighborhood is not marked down for being expensive or up for being cheap. What residents say about rents is shown next to the numbers.

Where the numbers come from

Each neighborhood is drawn with New York City Planning’s official neighborhood boundaries. “Within a 10-minute walk” means within 615 meters in a straight line of each census tract’s center, averaged over the people who live there. Data is for calendar year 2025 unless a source says otherwise, and rents are the latest three months StreetEasy has published. Each neighborhood’s page shows the numbers behind every grade and lists its sources.

See every graded neighborhood.