NYC Streets to Avoid: The 50 Worst-Rated Based on Real Complaints

About Worst Streets & Avenues

These are the streets that score worst once complaints are counted against the people exposed to them and against what the block can reach on foot. They are rarely the famous ones. Shopping strips carry heavy complaint totals but also carry thousands of residents, so the bottom of this list runs instead through low-density edges: service roads and dead ends beside rail yards and airports, where a handful of homes sit a long way from a train. Queens holds more of them than any borough. The other route to the bottom is a genuinely bad building record, which shows up as a low housing reading on an otherwise unremarkable street. Read the dimension breakdown rather than the grade alone: the reason a street ranks here tells you whether the problem is the block or the landlord.