Best Streets to Live on in Staten Island

The best-graded Staten Island blocks are on the North Shore waterfront and in the South Shore residential grid. The hills, which the borough is proudest of, are not on the list.

Stapleton and St. George. Navy Pier Court grades 84, six points clear of anything else on the island, with a traffic-safety score of 97, a transit score of 88 and a food score of 73. That access pair is the strongest on the island, and it belongs to redeveloped waterfront inside a walk of the free ferry. It is also 2 buildings holding 571 homes, so read it as one address rather than a neighborhood. Bay Street Landing, a few minutes north, is the same shape at 82, with quiet at 91 and transit at 89.

Oakwood. 9th Street is one of a handful of ordinary residential blocks on the island to reach an A. It grades 80 on the strength of a traffic-safety score of 98, a cleanliness score of 91 and a food score of 78, unusually high for the island. It has 35 buildings on it.

The band just below the A line is the borough's actual strength. Thornycroft Avenue, Winchester Avenue, Fairbanks Avenue and 2nd Street all sit on it, with Ridgecrest Avenue and 10th Street a point back. Winchester and Fairbanks both post perfect quiet scores. Thornycroft reads 98 on traffic safety, Winchester 98 and Ridgecrest 98. This is an ordinary residential grid grading extraordinarily well on the measures taken at the curb.

Todt Hill appears nowhere above. Todt Hill Road grades 32 and Benedict Road 24, and Todt Hill Road scores 0 on traffic safety and 14 on quiet. A wide fast road with a handful of estates on it carries crash volume and complaint volume past almost no front doors, which is what a per-household measure is built to catch. Four Corners Road, off the same ridge, scores 86 on quiet.

One structural note. More streets on Staten Island carry no livability grade than in any other borough. If a street here shows an access grade and nothing else, fewer than 20 homes sit on it.

Every Staten Island neighborhood makes the same trade at a different depth, so the question is not which one scores best. It is how steep the trade runs where you would be living, measured as the gap between a ZIP code's quiet average and its food-access average.

The deep South Shore runs it steepest: 10312 posts the island's widest gap between those two columns, and 10309 is close behind, on the two lowest food-access averages of any ZIP code in New York City. It buys something at the curb. 10309 holds the best traffic-safety average on the island, and 10312 the most blocks at 85 or higher on quiet. The North Shore reverses it. Port Richmond's 10302 is the only Staten Island ZIP code whose food average beats its quiet average, and the only one whose food figure clears the citywide 53, but it pays for that on cleanliness and on the overall grade. Tottenville sits in between. Its 10307 posts the lowest quiet average of the South Shore ZIP codes in the table below, under Great Kills, Charleston and Annadale, which makes the end of the line a shallower version of this trade rather than its deepest.

Inside those ZIP codes the blocks separate hard. In 10314, Freedom Avenue reads 94 on cleanliness and 99 on traffic safety with food at 23, while Coale Avenue in the same ZIP code scores 78 on food. Two blocks in one ZIP code sit more than fifty points apart on the same column. In 10304, Carmel Court scores 99 on quiet and Todt Hill Road 14, in the same ZIP code. In 10301, Bay Street grades 53 with a transit score of 78 and a quiet score of 11, and Stuyvesant Place grades 53 on a quiet score of 3, the lowest quiet score on this page. Away from the terminal it flips: Port Richmond Avenue grades 65 with quiet at 95, and North Mada Avenue in 10310 grades 65 with quiet at 97 and transit at 19. The commercial spines are the consistent losers: New Dorp Lane grades 41 on a cleanliness score of 8, and Giffords Lane in Great Kills grades 48 on a cleanliness score of 17.

The gap is the number to read here. It separates an address that is calm because of how it was laid out from one that is calm because nothing is near it, and the overall grade treats those two the same.

Staten Island averages 58 on the quiet score, five points clear of Queens in second, and it holds 322 blocks at 85 or higher, more than Brooklyn and Manhattan combined.

Fewer than ten graded streets on the island post a perfect quiet score. The two that also grade well overall are Winchester Avenue and Fairbanks Avenue, both at 81, with Laredo Avenue at 74 and Shotwell Avenue at 66 behind them. Carmel Court in Stapleton scores 99, with 10th Street at 97, 2nd Street at 94 and Thornycroft Avenue at 96. By ZIP code, Great Kills leads the island at 66, with the Annadale ZIP code at 64 and the New Dorp one at 59, all well above the citywide 50.

Our reading of why is structural. The island has the lowest population density of the five boroughs and no elevated track anywhere on it, and the 311 noise line is largely a record of how close people live to one another.

The exceptions are the through-roads. Hylan Boulevard scores 51 on quiet and Tompkins Avenue 26, and Todt Hill Road is worse than either at 14.

Read this section knowing what the number is. The safety score counts injuries and deaths from NYPD collision records, divided by the homes and businesses on the street. It is traffic, not crime, and nothing in it describes how a block feels after dark.

Staten Island leads, narrowly, averaging 56 to Manhattan's 55, and it holds 260 blocks scoring 85 or higher, the largest supply in the city. Thornycroft Avenue, Winchester Avenue, Ridgecrest Avenue, Navy Pier Court and Fairbanks Avenue all sit at or above 97.

And then the island holds some of the worst streets in New York on the same measure. Todt Hill Road scores 0 out of 100, with Richmond Terrace at 2, Hylan Boulevard at 3, Amboy Road at 7 and Tompkins Avenue at 13. Those are the roads the borough is organized around, and each carries a full day of regional traffic past a thin line of driveways.

Both readings are true of the same island. A handful of graded streets score 0 on traffic safety, among them Todt Hill Road, Arthur Kill Road and Slosson Avenue, while more than fifty blocks clear 85 on quiet and traffic safety at once. The borough average describes neither group.

The scores tell you where the good blocks are. Whether they are right for you comes down to one trade: quiet and traffic safety in exchange for distance and a car.

1. The commute. The ferry is free and runs about 25 minutes to Lower Manhattan, and the subway on the far side adds to that. From the South Shore you are often better off on an express bus.
2. The car. The best transit average on the island belongs to Stapleton and Clifton's 10304, at 53, and four ZIP codes sit under 30, among them New Springville's 10314 at 21. Outside a few corners, daily life here assumes you drive.
3. Urban or suburban. Bay Street in St. George scores 78 on transit access and 11 on quiet. New Lane in Dongan Hills scores 27 on transit and 97 on quiet. Decide which of those two commutes you want.
4. Which shore. The North Shore holds the food access, 54 in Port Richmond and 42 in West Brighton against 22 and 21 on the deep South Shore, and the South Shore holds everything measured at the curb. West Brighton's 10310 comes closest to both.
5. Parking. Our parking score reads 311 parking complaints against the homes and businesses on a block. Staten Island averages 61 on it, second in the city behind Manhattan, and 10306 averages 67, the highest on the island. Curb space is the one thing out here that gets easier rather than harder.

Staten Island rewards a specific kind of person: families who want room, and anyone who would take quiet and a yard over a bar downstairs. The drawbacks sit in the same columns, food access at 31 and transit at 36. Set your floor before you tour, because below 30 on food access nothing is within a walk, and on this island that is most of the map.

Our scores are built from complaint, violation and crash records, not from rent.