Real Estate

This borough has the smallest average apartment sizes for all of NYC

Luxury apartment buildings in the Long Island City neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York, US, on Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022. New York’s apartment market has become super competitive as rent prices set records and vacancies stay low.
Ismail Ferdous/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Feeling a bit cramped in your New York City apartment? You're not alone, especially if you live in one borough in particular.

New York City is not exactly known for having ludicrously capacious living situations (at least for most people), but Queens appears to take it to another level. The borough has the smallest new apartments on average among each of the five boroughs, and the third-smallest in the country overall, according to a report from the real estate site RentCafe.

So just how small are the Queens apartments? At 692 square feet on average, new apartments there are slightly smaller than the ones found in Brooklyn, which on average measure out to 712 square feet.

Both boroughs have seen the size of the average new apartment there shrink over the past 10 years, according to RentCafe. Queens' apartments have lost 32 square feet on average, a decline of 4.4% in the past decade. In Brooklyn, the shrink is a bit smaller: About 21 square feet smaller, a loss of about 2.9% of space.

Among major U.S. cities, only Seattle and Portland average smaller apartment sizes. The average new apartment in Seattle is 661 square feet, while Portland's is 685 square feet.

Not far behind Queens and Brooklyn is Manhattan, where the average new apartment is 737 square feet — which is actually an increase of 2.2% from a decade ago, adding 16 square feet, RentCafe found. Manhattan had the sixth-smallest new apartment size, behind Detroit.

Two cities in New Jersey also made the list: With new apartments averaging 788 square feet, Jersey City was ranked 15th on the list, while Newark was 20th. The Garden State's largest city actually saw the average new apartment size increase pretty dramatically since 2014, adding 113 square feet, up more than 16%.

Looking for a bit more room? Head to Gainesville, Florida, where the average new apartment there is just under 1,200 square feet, according to RentCafe. It was one of five Florida cities to make the list with the largest new apartments.

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