You Will Be Shocked to Know Which New York City Neighborhood Is the Safest

Forget Tribeca, the West Village, or the Upper East Side, NYC’s safest neighborhood is Fresh Meadows, Queens
Residential district in Queens against skyline of New York U.S. The Queens neighborhood of Fresh Meadows was recently...
Residential district in Queens against skyline of New York, U.S. The Queens neighborhood of Fresh Meadows was recently ranked the safest in all of New York City.Sasha Maslov / Aurora Photos

As life slowly begins to return to normal, New Yorkers can finally start obsessing about normal things—like rising crime, rising rents, and rising ocean levels.

The New York Post recently assessed neighborhood data across the five boroughs, incorporating everything from green spaces and average temperatures to 911 punctuality and proximity to hospitals. After crunching the numbers, the paper’s top pick might surprise the uninitiated: Fresh Meadows, Queens. “That small slice of Queens, sandwiched between the Long Island Expressway, Union Turnpike, Cunningham Park, and 164th Street, beats out every other part of the city in terms of safety and quality of life,” writer Allison Hope said.

Overall, New York is experiencing a spike in violent crime: After soaring in 2020, shootings are still up 96% compared to 2019 levels, and murders are up 39%, according to NYPD’s CompStat Unit

Fresh Meadows, meanwhile, has reported no murders so far in 2021—compared to eight in Astoria, six on the Upper East Side, and four on the Lower East Side. The number of burglaries is less than half than that of Midtown (141 break-ins, compared to 308), and the car theft rate was .76 per 1,000 residents, compared to 1.05 in the East Village. In all, 728 crimes were reported in Fresh Meadows in the first nine months of 2021—or about 4.8 crimes per 1,000 residents. Compare that to 7.4 in Long Island City and a whopping 95.2 in the Times Square area.

New York City Council Member James F. Gennaro, who represents Fresh Meadows, told AD he’s worked to build bridges between the community and the 107th police precinct and pushed for increased police funding this year. “It’s great to see that make such a difference in the crime rate,” Gennaro said. “The good residents of Fresh Meadows and the local precinct should be proud of all their hard work.” If something untoward should happen, residents can rest easy that Fresh Meadows also has among the fastest 911 response times in the city (1.9 minutes), third only to Rockaway Beach (1.6) and Far Rockaway (1.8).

Elliott Sudwards, a Queens realtor with Triplemint, says he’s not surprised at the choice. “You don’t really have public transportation, like the subway or LIRR, so it’s a quiet neighborhood,” Sudwards told Architectural Digest. “And a majority of the properties are houses, and that means people are more invested in their neighborhood. On your street, everyone knows each other.” Most of the calls Sudwards gets about homes in Fresh Meadows are from young families and newlyweds. “It’s a real community, which is something that you don’t get a lot of in New York,” he said. Prices for a three-bedroom home range between $1 and $1.5 million, Sudwards estimated. Not cheap, but a much better bang for your buck than other neighborhoods.

Fresh Meadows’s development predates the American Revolution by over a century: In the 1630s, Dutch sailors called it Vlissingen, or Salt Meadow Valley, after a city in southwestern Netherlands. It got its modern name from the freshwater springs that served the town of Flushing, which it was once part of.

Fresh Meadows is still one of the city’s greener neighborhoods. As The Post points out, when area farmland was converted into housing and commercial properties in the 19th century, developers worked to preserve natural areas. (Fresh Meadows was home to New York City’s last commercial farm, Klein Farm, which held on until November 2001.) Today, the neighborhood is home to both Cunningham Park and sprawling Alley Pond, home to Queens Giant, a 366-year-old tulip poplar that’s believed to be the oldest living thing in New York City. A healthier tree canopy means Fresh Meadows is cooler than other nabes and, since it’s not in a major flood zone, it’s (relatively) safe from the ravages of climate change.

The concentration of fine particulate matter, air pollution associated with lung and heart disease, is lower in Fresh Meadows (0.0078 milligrams per cubic meter) than both the borough-wide and the citywide averages, according to 2018 Community Health Profile. The neighborhood even has one of the lowest numbers of rat complaints in the Big Apple: Just five in all of 2018, according to Renthop, compared to 86 in Bayridge and 554 on the tony Upper West Side.

And, as Allison Hope reported, Fresh Meadows is cradled by the Grand Central Parkway and Long Island Expressway. So, if the Apocalypse does come to New York, you can beat a hasty retreat.