Married couples own more homes than any other household type across nearly every corner of New York City, but Manhattan stands apart, where singles, roommates, and unmarried partners have taken the lead. That split, drawn from a fresh borough-by-borough breakdown of homeownership patterns, shows just how differently the city's five boroughs are structured when it comes to who actually holds the deed.
Citywide, married-couple families make up 51% of homeowners, according to a New York Post analysis of PropertyShark data. That is below the national figure of 59%, but still enough to make married couples the largest single ownership category in the five boroughs. Nonfamily owners, defined as residents who live alone or with an unmarried partner or roommate rather than a spouse or relatives, account for 31% of city homeowners, compared with 27% nationally.
Manhattan flips that script entirely. It is the only borough where nonfamily owners outnumber married-couple families, holding 48% of homes compared to married couples' 45%, per the same analysis. Eight of the ten New York City neighborhoods with majority-nonfamily ownership sit in Manhattan, including Central Park South at 73% and Tudor City at 68%. Hudson Yards tops even those figures, with nonfamily owners holding 69% of homes there.
Outer Boroughs Stay Traditional
Outside Manhattan, the numbers look far more conventional. Staten Island posts the highest married-couple ownership share of any borough at 60%, while Brooklyn sits at 53% and Queens at 53% as well. The Bronx trails at 42%, the lowest married-couple share among the boroughs, according to the report.
Brooklyn's Mill Basin stands out even within that outer-borough pattern, with married couples holding 75% of homes there, the report notes. That kind of concentration reflects a broader citywide reality in which single-family housing stock, rather than the high-rise co-ops and condos common in Manhattan, tends to correlate with married-couple ownership.
Where Female-Led Households Lead
Female-led family households, defined in the analysis as homes headed by a woman with relatives present and no spouse, lead total homeownership outright in five New York City neighborhoods. No neighborhood in the city has male-led family households as its top ownership category, the Post's analysis found. In the Bronx's Longwood, female-led families account for 44% of homeowners, while in Mount Hope, male-led family households still make up 29% of the ownership pool despite trailing female-led households citywide.
Those patterns line up with a separate breakdown from PropertyShark, which found female-led family households outnumber male-led family households in 254 of 278 analyzed New York City neighborhoods, or roughly 91%. The Bronx has the highest concentration of female-led family homeowners of any borough, at 19.5% of owner-occupied homes, compared with just 6.3% in Manhattan. That imbalance echoes a national trend documented by HousingWire, which found single women own about 22% of owner-occupied homes in major U.S. metros compared with less than 13% for single men, and that single women make up 30% of Gen Z homebuyers.
An Older, More Established Owner Base
New Yorkers 65 and older hold 38% of the city's owner-occupied homes, while residents under 35 hold just 8%, the same analysis notes. That skew tracks with a national shift toward later-in-life homebuying; the median age for a first-time homebuyer climbed to 40 in 2025, as Hoodline has previously reported.
The underlying rarity of homeownership itself helps explain these patterns. New York City's overall homeownership rate is roughly 33%, less than half the national rate of about 65%, per PropertyShark's broader neighborhood analysis. New York State ranked lowest in the nation for statewide homeownership in 2024 and 2025, at approximately 51% to 52%, a gap largely driven by the dense multi-family housing stock that makes up more than 60% of the city's total housing, according to USA Facts.
Concourse Bucks the Manhattan-Only Narrative
Manhattan may lead the city overall in nonfamily ownership, but it does not hold every record. The Bronx's Concourse neighborhood recorded the highest share of nonfamily homeowners citywide at 84%, surpassing every Manhattan neighborhood, PropertyShark's analysis found. That figure is driven by a small owner-occupied inventory and a wave of early-career purchasers in the area, per the report.
Staten Island's Concord and Charleston neighborhoods rank second and third citywide for married-couple homeownership, at 74% and 73% respectively, trailing only Mill Basin. Married couples aged 35 to 64 hold 39% of all owner-occupied homes on Staten Island, the highest concentration for that age group in any borough, reinforcing the island's reputation as the city's most traditional, suburban-style ownership market.
City officials have taken notice of who does and does not hold onto property in New York. In March, Mayor Zohran Mamdani paused the city's tax lien sale program, which had previously bundled unpaid property and water debts for sale to private investment trusts, in favor of transitioning toward a public land bank meant to protect vulnerable homeowners. The city has also offered tax breaks to encourage existing homeowners to build accessory dwelling units under its City of Yes zoning changes, part of a broader push to preserve homeownership amid a housing market that leaves most New Yorkers renting.
