Long Island – the land of single-family homes

Single-family homes overwhelmingly dominated Long Island’s housing landscape and is both what makes Long Island unique as well as unaffordable for many.

And if we compare our housing stock to the state average or our neighboring counties, it becomes even more apparent how drastically different we are:

To explore this deeper, we’ve visualized the data on the map below, looking specifically at village and hamlet-level data.

Nine out of ten of the villages and hamlets on Long Island are overwhelmingly single-family homes (75% or more) with only about 3% of the villages and hamlets on Long Island skewing toward multi-family homes (50% or more of built structures are multi-family homes) as of 2020.

Areas near LIRR stations tend to have more multi-family homes, perhaps as an effect of the push for more transit-oriented development.

What complicates this data somewhat is Long Island has swathes of land that are preserved for recreation or protected farmland.

Using this map, you can see the boundaries of every village or hamlet on Long Island, the percentage of structures that are single family homes, LIRR stations and a 1/2 mile radius around them as well as areas that are zoned off from housing developments.

Source: ACS 2020