Queens

Advertising

Population	2293007 (2008)
Area	109.7 sq m
Rental listings	178 no-fee, 49 fee ads
Median rent	$3,631

Unlike more populous Brooklyn, Queens has never been a separate city or rather, it has never been a single separate city (the part of Queens closest to Manhattan has; thus, the "city" part of "Long Island City" is not spurious). This fact goes a long way toward explaining why most of Queens is still organized as if it were a loose conglomeration of villages with no overall center. The same disjointed legacy survives in the postal addressing system (well… to the extent that the latter itself survives): in contrast to the other four boroughs, Queens's mailing addresses are mostly based on the original town names.

To riff on a tangentially related theme, Queens is sometimes (and with good reason) called "the immigrant borough." Which is fine, as far as labels go, though we would have prefered "the polyglot borough," given all the languages that are spoken across Queens. Then again, one would need to know what a "polyglot" is, so let's stick with the first option. Almost all of the borough's neighborhoods have a significant share of immigrant population, but Flushing, Jackson Heights, Astoria, Sunnyside, and Woodside stand out as the most diverse.

Current Rental Statistics

Layout	Ads	Median	Average
Studio	47	$2,880	$2,988
1 Bedroom	95	$3,700	$3,674
2 Bedroom	67	$4,500	$4,610
3+ Bedrooms	18	$5,485	$5,362
Total	227	$3,631	$3,942
See all Queens Rental Apartments

Total: 178 no-fee, 49 fee ads

Queens Building Heights

Apartments and Buildings

Most of Queens is low-rise, which is to say that living in Queens usually means living in a building with fewer than five stories. Only a handful of densely populated neighborhoods (Astoria, Flushing) have pockets of mid-rise (5-to-10-story) buildings. Where this rule of thumb doesn't hold at all, however, is in the skyscraper enclave called Long Island City.

The 2019 Amazon fiasco will soon be forgotten, but with or without Amazon (and thousands of Mr. Bezos's highly efficient employees), this portion of the city is still growing like it's been juicing or something. The new buildings are numerous here and so are the buttons in their elevators. These densely-packed high-rises typically boast many shared amenities: gyms, media and entertainment spaces, rooftop terraces, pools, services of all kinds, and so on. With a handful of exceptions, the low- and mid-rise Queens is rather skimpy on all this stuff (with most of the exceptions being those rare mid-rises that employ doormen). But then again, if you go low-rise, you probably won't have to live next to a bunch of fresh-faced 25-year-old Amazon employees. Unless you are a 25-year-old Amazon employee, in which case, maybe you'd rather live next door from your colleagues. The point is, in Queens, you've got choices: building heights, neighbors, amenities… and cuisines.