The Best Neighborhoods in Staten Island, by the Data

On DwellCheck's Livability & Safety score, Great Kills ranks highest in Staten Island at 7.7 out of 10. That is two thirds of its published livability composite (6.5/10) plus one third of its safety score (10/10), and its safety score comes from being #1 of 14 Staten Island neighborhoods on NYPD complaints per 1,000 residents, at 19.7 per 1,000 over the 12 months ending June 30, 2026. The score covers building maintenance, subway access, trees and noise, park access and crime rate. It still contains no rent, price or school data.

Two components, both printed in the table so you can reproduce any row by hand. Livability & Safety = (2/3 × livability composite) + (1/3 × safety score), rounded to one decimal. The livability composite is the score published on each neighborhood's own page: (0.30 × practical + 0.20 × commute + 0.20 × art + 0.15 × outdoor) ÷ 0.85, where practical is HPD housing violations per residential lot, commute counts subway stations and lines inside the neighborhood, ART combines tree density with 311 noise per resident, and outdoor combines tree count with park proximity. And safety score = borough safety percentile ÷ 10, where the borough safety percentile is the neighborhood's standing on NYPD complaints per 1,000 residents among the 14 Staten Island neighborhoods with a safety page — 100 means the lowest crime rate per resident in the borough.

The neighborhood pages print the livability composite, which has no crime term in it. This page ranks on the composite blended with a safety score, so the order is different and the headline number is higher or lower than the composite. Both numbers appear in the table for every neighborhood, and nothing about the published composites changed — only this page's ranking metric.

No, and this is the score's main limitation. The safety component is a rank within the borough, so the safest neighborhood in any borough scores 10 on safety even where the borough's absolute crime rate is much higher than another's. Compare the "complaints per 1,000 residents" column instead — that is an absolute rate and it is comparable everywhere.

Rent and sale prices: the repo holds no neighborhood rent-level data, so there is no affordability input and a cheap neighborhood and an expensive one can score identically. School quality, and job access beyond subway coverage inside the neighborhood. Crime is now in the score, but only as a rate per resident over 12 months ending June 30, 2026 — read the Staten Island safest-neighborhoods page for the full crime picture including violent crime and shootings.

We do not have family-specific data — no school ratings, playground counts or household-composition scores — so we do not publish a "best for families" ranking rather than dressing this one up as one. The columns closest to what families usually ask about are the safety score, outdoor (tree count and park proximity) and practical (HPD housing violations, so how well buildings are maintained); all three are in the table above, and the quietest-neighborhoods page covers noise.

1 Staten Island neighborhood (Stapleton) has a livability composite but no published safety data, so it cannot be scored on a safety-inclusive metric. In every case that is because the neighborhood has no Neighborhood Tabulation Area of its own and is measured inside a larger one. It is listed separately below with its composite, rather than being renormalized to composite-only and mixed into the ranking where it could outrank scored neighborhoods purely by having no crime data.

They change when the city data is re-pulled and the guide and safety files are regenerated. Each neighborhood page shows the generation date for its own scores, and the safety data behind the safety component covers the 12 months ending June 30, 2026. The ranking is a snapshot of city records, not a live feed.