Best Brooklyn Neighborhoods for Young Professionals

Every apartment-hunting guide repeats the same trick for Williamsburg: live one block off Bedford Avenue and you get the scene without the noise. Our complaint records say it works in one direction and fails in the other.

Bedford Avenue scores 31 out of 100 on quiet. Berry Street, one block toward the river, scores 8. Driggs Avenue, one block the other way, scores 40. Go west and you land somewhere considerably louder than the avenue you were avoiding. Go east and you gain a little, though Driggs still sits under the Brooklyn average of 51.

Berry loses on litter too. Its cleanliness score is 3 out of 100, against 9 for Bedford. The deliveries and the after-midnight foot traffic spill onto the block between the corridor and the water, and the sanitation complaints follow.

Bedford Avenue runs the length of Brooklyn, from Williamsburg down to Sheepshead Bay, and our score is one number for all of it, so the calm southern miles lift what the Williamsburg stretch earns on its own. Even diluted, Bedford Avenue's 31 beats Berry Street's 8, which is the part of the myth that does not survive.

If you want quiet near the scene, take the inland side, measure distance in minutes instead of blocks, ask whether the unit faces the street or a rear yard, and read the score for the exact address. Greenpoint's side streets and the eastern blocks of Crown Heights are where North Brooklyn calm actually shows up in our rankings.

Williamsburg grades 56 in 11211, the strongest ZIP code on this page, on transit at 79 and food access at 86. That food score counts restaurants rather than groceries, so it is a nightlife reading as much as a convenience one. Quiet is the weak column, at 39, and the calm blocks are nowhere near the L: Lee Avenue in South Williamsburg scores 99 on quiet and 39 on food access.

Greenpoint inverts the rule you would expect from a map. The commercial spines are the calm part. Nassau Avenue scores 86 on quiet and Manhattan Avenue 82, while the blocks running down toward Newtown Creek score in single digits. 11222 averages 47 on quiet and 59 on transit, the lowest here.

Bushwick carries the loudest ZIP code in this guide. On our 311 records 11237 averages 23 on quiet and 33 on traffic safety. What it gets for that is reach: 77 on transit and 87 on food access. St. Nicholas Avenue is the calmest street in the ZIP at 73 and grades 70 overall.

Bed-Stuy has the brownstones and the trains, 84 on transit in 11216. Housing, built from the HPD violation record, averages 29 against 46 for Brooklyn. And the quiet ceiling is low: Tompkins Avenue is the calmest of the 15 graded streets in 11216, at 51, so nothing in the ZIP code reaches what a South Williamsburg or Crown Heights block reaches.

Crown Heights is the neighborhood where the exact address decides the most. Across its 12 graded streets, 11213 averages 54 on quiet, the best number on this page, and holds 3 blocks at 85 or higher. It also holds the widest quiet spread of the five: Agate Court scores 95 and Lincoln Place, a few blocks away, scores 6. Housing is the weak column, at 20.

Brooklyn's graded streets average 49 on traffic safety, which counts NYPD crash injuries and deaths against the homes on the block. Across all five neighborhoods the baseline hazard is cars rather than crowds. Remember it when a listing calls a through-route a quiet residential street.

1. Look up the exact street. Any of Brooklyn's 1,298 graded streets returns its scores on quiet, cleanliness, traffic safety, roads, parking, housing, transit, food and street trees. Each one is a rank inside that street's own type, so 50 is the middle of the type: below 50 on quiet, keep looking.
2. Pull the parallel streets as well as your own. Bedford, Berry and Driggs show that noise does not fall off evenly in both directions.
3. Check the train you would actually ride. Williamsburg and Bushwick live on the L, Greenpoint leans on the G, and that difference is the 59 in 11222 against 84 in 11216.
4. Walk it late on a Friday. The complaint records tell you what the block is like at 11pm, and the walk tells you whether you can live with it.

In a borough this size, checking the exact block changes the answer often enough to be worth ten minutes.