Units Got Smaller. Households Didn’t

Census data shows the neighborhood’s housing stock has shifted decisively toward smaller units, even as its average household size didn’t shrink to match, a mismatch which we can’t untangle.

Studio apartments made up 7.1 percent of housing units in Hunters Point South and Long Island City’s residential core in 2010. By 2024, that share had nearly tripled, to 20.3 percent, according to Census Bureau estimates. Nowhere else nearby is building this way: New York City’s studio share barely moved over the same period, from 7.2 to 9.6 percent, and Queens as a whole from 4.4 to 6.8 percent.

This matters beyond a curiosity about apartment sizes: a neighborhood’s unit mix shapes who can afford to live there, how many children it can hold, how much retail and school capacity it needs, and whether new housing is actually built for long-term residents or for a faster-turnover population passing through. The scale of this shift, tripling in fourteen years while comparable geographies barely moved, means this neighborhood’s built form is diverging from the city around it in a specific, measurable direction: smaller.

The share of studio apartment growth came almost entirely at the expense of larger units, not smaller ones squeezed further. Three-bedroom units fell from 9.9 percent of the housing stock in 2010 to 4.7 percent in 2024, and one-bedroom units slipped from 48.2 to 45.7 percent. This wasn’t studios replacing studios or families splitting into smaller households within the same unit types. It was new construction systematically favoring the smallest unit category on the ACS bedroom scale, in a neighborhood that was simultaneously building faster than almost anywhere else in the city.

What This Suggests

New housing built at this pace and skewed this heavily toward studios is housing built primarily for individuals and couples, not families expecting to grow into a home over years. That has direct implications for the neighborhood’s future school enrollment, retail mix, and the durability of its population growth, since single-occupant and couple households turn over housing more frequently than family households do.

Smaller units, about the same household size

If the unit-mix story were the whole story, average household size here should have declined steadily: smaller units generally house fewer people per household. Instead, it rose, from 1.88 people per household in 2010 to a peak of 2.14 in 2020, before falling back to 1.91 by 2024, landing almost exactly where it started. New York City and Queens, over the same quarter century, both declined steadily and without a hump, from 2.60 to 2.48 citywide and 2.81 to 2.72 in Queens.

What’s going on?

Census data can’t say why household size rose here while unit sizes shrank.

What the data does establish clearly is that this neighborhood’s housing story isn’t a single, uniform trend toward smaller households. It’s at least two different things happening within the same neighborhood a housing stock built overwhelmingly smaller, and a population that, for now, hasn’t shrunk to match it.