Brooklyn Homebuyers Head for Staten Island as Price Gap Widens Across the Narrows

As Brooklynites decamp for Staten Island in record numbers, the city’s evolving housing market casts new light on affordability, migration and the shifting fault lines of urban life.

Mid-century New York made it a point of pride that nobody moved to Staten Island unless they had family there—or a penchant for ferry rides. Today, however, the borough of parks, bungalows, and relentless modesty is enjoying unlikely appeal among those priced out of Brooklyn’s frenzied property market. According to recent research by Property Shark, fully 12% of former Brooklynites who bought a home this year chose to cross the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge for new lives in the city’s oft-overlooked fifth borough.

The scale of the migration is less breathtaking than its symbolism. Of the 2,669 Brooklyn residents purchasing homes in the first five months of 2025, 315 opted for Staten Island. This stands as the greatest inter-borough migration in New York, a city not otherwise known for such leaps of faith between its patchwork of identities. Brooklynites, especially from Sunset Park, Bensonhurst, Borough Park, and Bay Ridge, are snapping up homes for a median price of $712,000—a comparative bargain next to Brooklyn’s $850,000.

This flow is a telling indicator. As housing prices in Brooklyn balloon, pushing even long-term denizens towards smaller spaces and longer commutes, Staten Island presents an alluring respite: larger homes, lower car insurance, and space to park a car without the saga of alternate-side rules. Unfashionable as it may still be, the “borough of parks” offers what Brooklyn now struggles to: space, safety, and a chance at semi-suburban normality. The trend, while not gargantuan in statistical terms, portends significant cultural and economic shifts.

New Yorkers are nothing if not loyal to their geography. The Property Shark report notes that an overwhelming 97% of Staten Islanders who bought homes this year remained in their home borough. Brooklyn’s exodus is thus all the starker, highlighting a growing price disparity that leaves would-be buyers hunting farther afield. Such flows suggest that the city’s housing market, far from being a staid game of musical chairs, is becoming a game of leapfrog—sometimes across the Narrows.

The migration brings first-order implications. For Staten Island, an influx of Brooklynites could inject dynamism, diversity and, for some, a whiff of anxiety about rising prices and changing neighbourhood textures. For Brooklyn, homeownership becomes ever more daunting, particularly for mid-level earners and young families—a point underscored by the steady churn of buyers from its southern and western precincts.

Ripple effects are already visible. Schools in Staten Island report slight bumps in enrolment, and local businesses find themselves catering, gingerly, to new tastes. Yet the legacy population’s deep-rootedness—Staten Island’s homeownership rate is the city’s highest, and its voters reliably sceptical of progressive excess—suggests any wholesale transformation will be gradual at best.

The housing shuffle is an old New York tale with a modern coda. Growing inter-borough movement undermines the myth of an insular metropolis where people live and die on the same ten blocks. The current data, moreover, muddy the narrative of endless out-migration to Sun Belt states; New Yorkers, it seems, are still willing to play real estate musical chairs within city limits, sliding sideways across borough boundaries before conceding defeat.

An insular market faces new forces

Second-order implications ripple beyond mere addresses. Politically, an influx of Brooklyn voters—progressive, younger, more ethnically varied—into Staten Island, historically a conservative stronghold, could smudge familiar electoral geographies. Economically, the divergence in home values between the two boroughs bodes poorly for Brooklyn’s middle class, and may bolster Staten Island’s property tax base at just the moment municipal budgets grow strained. Culturally, the juxtaposition augurs both opportunity—more cross-pollination—and tension, should gentrification anxieties take hold.

Interestingly, New York’s experience fits a national template. The gravitational pull of affordable, spacious peripheries—whether it’s New Jersey’s transit towns, Westchester’s leafy enclaves, or Queens’s eastern reaches—has only intensified since the pandemic. Nationwide, small cities and edge suburbs saw population growth in 2023–24 even as urban cores stalled. Yet New York’s borough-by-borough migration is rather more idiosyncratic: a product of unique constraints (rent stabilisation, the limits of mass transit, arcane zoning) and a peculiar brand of urban parochialism. Unlike cities where leaving the urban core means “suburb”, here it may just mean the next bridge borough.

All told, the city’s current real estate churn is neither exclusively dire nor overwhelmingly buoyant. Higher rates and slowing new construction mean bargains remain few and far between even in supposed refuges like Staten Island. But the evolving mix of buyers—be they old-timers, upwardly mobile immigrants or “priced out” professionals—refutes the idea that New York’s property market is monocultural. Ownership, as Property Shark’s Eliza Theiss dryly observes, is “layered, uneven and increasingly defined by how people buy as much as where.”

We reckon the story is as much about adaptation as it is about cost. Average New Yorkers, famously deft at making do, are quietly reshaping the city’s map in search of more for less. This may rejuvenate corners long dismissed as “off the grid,” and perhaps, over time, render such labels obsolete.

For all the periodic hand-wringing over exoduses and affordability crises, New York’s fundamental allure remains: density, diversity, a certain chaotic appeal. The pattern of Brooklynites washing up in Staten Island hardly portends disaster. Instead, it is the latest chapter in a perennial story—a city forced to change, sometimes in the most unexpected directions, but rarely diminished. ■