Census data shows the population of Hunters Point South and Long Island City’s residential core grew from 7,681 to 30,148 since 2010, a rate of growth without precedent anywhere else in the city.
In 2010, roughly 7,681 people lived in the residential core of Hunters Point South and Long Island City. By 2024, that number had reached 30,148, according to Census Bureau estimates. Almost four times as many people live here now as did fourteen years ago.
New York City as a whole grew too, but barely. Citywide population rose about 3 percent between 2013 and 2023. In the same eleven years, this neighborhood’s population grew 147.4 percent, a rate of growth roughly 49 times faster than the city around it. If this neighborhood had grown at New York City’s citywide rate since 2010, it would have about 8,066 residents today. Instead it has 30,148, more than 22,000 more people than the city’s own growth rate would predict.
What Made This Possible
Two rezonings, one in Hunters Point South starting in the late 2000s and one in Long Island City’s Court Square and Queens West areas, opened up land that had been zoned for manufacturing and low-density use for large-scale residential development. City-owned waterfront parcels in Hunters Point South were developed specifically for mixed-income housing, while private development in Court Square and Queens West added market-rate towers on formerly industrial and underused sites.
This is not, on its own, a story about displacement. The 7-tract residential core analyzed in this series excludes the industrial-zoned tracts (1.03, 1.04, and part of 19.03) where population barely exists at all. The growth documented here happened predominantly in newly constructed buildings, not through turnover in an existing housing stock.
HPS By the numbers
What The Numbers Don’t Settle
Census population estimates cannot say how many of the roughly 22,000 additional residents moved from elsewhere in New York City versus from outside it, or what this concentration of new housing has meant for schools, transit capacity, and open space, questions later pieces in this series will take up directly.
Randy Plemel
Publisher
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The founder and publisher of the Hunters Point Ledger, a newsletter covering Hunters Point South and Long Island City. He serves on Queens Community Board 2, and all views are his own.
