Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn NYC — Williamsburg's Heart | 2026
Bedford Ave defines Williamsburg: vintage shops, brunch spots, and the L train. Check safety, noise, and cleanliness by block.
Livability score
Grade C+, livability 48 out of 100.
Calm 32, ranked against major corridors. Access 79, ranked against every street in the city. More complaints per home than most major corridors, but a lot within a walk.
That puts Bedford Avenue in the bottom 42% of scored streets citywide.
Strongest on street crime (56) and tree cover (100). Cleanliness (9) is the weak spot.
On the record
Illegal parking is the most-filed complaint on Bedford Avenue, with 1,285 reports, and cleanliness ranks 9 among major corridors. Across every category, 7,663 reports sit on this street's 311 file, and 17% of them name illegal parking. Heat and hot water follows with 701 reports, and residential noise with 519. In all, 125 distinct 311 categories are represented on Bedford Avenue. Divided by the homes on file, Bedford Avenue carries roughly 76 reports per 100 of them.
Bedford Avenue carries 997 Class C violations on its HPD file, the most serious of the three classes an inspector can write, about 10 per 100 homes on file. HPD's most-cited category on Bedford Avenue is pests, at 729 violations. Behind it the file holds paint and lead (478 violations) and bed bugs (345). City housing records put 10,044 homes in 1,627 residential buildings on Bedford Avenue, 398 of them walk-up apartment buildings and 46 of them buildings with an elevator. Across those buildings the average is about 6.2 homes each.
Since 2021, 1,140 people have been injured in reported crashes here.
Among major corridors, Bedford Avenue ranks 35 on traffic safety and 12 on housing. That 12 on housing puts Bedford Avenue in the weakest quarter of major corridors. The card also puts parking at 35 and quietness at 26 among major corridors. Against every street in the city, Bedford Avenue ranks 85 on food nearby and 66 on transit. Of the three measures ranked citywide, tree cover is the strongest on Bedford Avenue, at 100. The band those ranks are drawn from holds about 190 major corridors.
The strongest band-ranked measure on Bedford Avenue is infrastructure, at 55.
40% of the 10,044 homes recorded on Bedford Avenue are rent-stabilized, 3,987 homes in all.
Scores are built from 311 complaints, HPD violations, NYPD crash records, NYPD felony complaint records, MTA stop locations, DOHMH food permits, and the street tree census, divided by the homes and businesses on the street, updated weekly. Read the scoring method or the data sources.
Nearest streets in Brooklyn
- N 6 Street, Brooklyn
- N 9 Street, Brooklyn
- N 4 Place, Brooklyn
- Frost Street, Brooklyn
- S 3 Street, Brooklyn
- Guernsey Street, Brooklyn
Bedford Avenue runs through Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg and Flatbush, where every scored street in the neighborhood is ranked beside it.
Every scored street in Brooklyn, the citywide rankings of all 5,700+ graded streets, or Queens vs Brooklyn: How the Two Boroughs Score (2026 Data).