Census data shows the overwhelming majority of people living in Hunters Point South and Long Island City’s residential core moved in after 2010, at a rate far higher than New York City or Queens as a whole. Most of them are living in buildings that didn’t exist when this decade began.
Of the roughly 30,000 people living in the residential core of Hunters Point South and Long Island City in 2024, 93.6 percent moved into their current home sometime after 2010, according to Census Bureau estimates. Citywide, only 60.9 percent of New Yorkers can say the same. In Queens as a whole, it’s 58.9 percent.
The gap is even sharper at the recent end. Nearly half of this neighborhood’s residents, 47.7 percent, moved in within just the last five years. Citywide, that figure is 20.4 percent. In Queens, 18.1 percent. Whatever is driving population change here, it isn’t a gradual reshuffling of an existing neighborhood. It’s the arrival of people into places that mostly did not exist a decade and a half ago.
Housing units in the neighborhood grew from 6,892 to 20,013 between 2013 and 2023, an increase of 13,121 units, or 190.4 percent. A population this new isn’t the product of existing residents cycling in and out of a fixed housing stock. It’s the product of a housing stock that mostly didn’t exist yet.
Only 0.9 percent of current residents have lived here since before 1990. In a neighborhood of 30,148 people, that’s roughly 260 residents total, spread across seven census tracts. Whatever this neighborhood looked like before its recent building boom, almost none of the people who lived through that earlier era are still counted among its current residents in Census Bureau data.
HPS By the numbers
What This Does And Doesn’t Tell Us
Move-in-year data can say when someone arrived at their current address. It can’t say where they came from, whether they previously lived elsewhere in the neighborhood, or why they moved. A resident who moved from one building in Hunters Point South to a newer one two blocks away would show up in this data exactly the same way as someone who arrived from another borough or another state entirely.
It also can’t settle whether the small, older population that remains reflects long-term residents who chose to stay through a period of rapid change around them, or whether it reflects survivorship in a data sense, longtime residents in the small pockets of older housing stock that were never redeveloped. Distinguishing between those explanations would require a different kind of research than Census estimates can provide.
This is a neighborhood where, according to Census Bureau data, the typical resident moved in recently, not because turnover here is unusually high, but because the neighborhood itself is new. Almost half its current population arrived in the last five years alone.
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.
