Staten Island's Overlooked Waterfront Emerges as a Surprise Luxury Market
With sweeping harbor views, larger lots, and prices a fraction of comparable Brooklyn properties, a stretch of Staten Island's North Shore is drawing high-end buyers who have decided the ferry commute is a price worth paying for space they cannot find anywhere else in the city.
By Bill Ren · July 5, 2026 · 5 min read
NEW YORK — The Staten Island Ferry remains free, which is one way to look at the commute that every buyer of property on the borough's North Shore must accept as part of the deal. Another way to look at it is as a scenic twenty-five-minute boat ride across one of the most storied harbors in the world, with unobstructed views of lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Increasingly, buyers capable of choosing among the city's most expensive markets are choosing to look at it the second way.
The luxury market on Staten Island's North Shore — centered on the historic neighborhoods of St. George, Tompkinsville, and Stapleton, and extending south along the Kill van Kull waterfront — has seen measurable price appreciation and a shift in buyer profile over the past two years. Properties that once sold primarily to local families with deep borough roots are now attracting buyers from Brooklyn, Manhattan, and, in several documented cases, from outside the region entirely. The draw is consistent: substantial square footage, private outdoor space, harbor views, and prices that remain steeply discounted relative to comparable properties across the water.
A detached single-family house with four bedrooms, a landscaped yard, and a direct water view can be found on Staten Island's North Shore for $1.2 million to $2.5 million, depending on condition and exact location. The equivalent property in Bay Ridge or Dyker Heights — the nearest Brooklyn neighborhoods in character and transit access — would cost at least twice as much. In the Slope or Carroll Gardens, it would not exist at a comparable price at any level of renovation.
The North Shore has also benefited from the kind of organic neighborhood investment that tends to precede and then accelerate luxury real estate interest. A cluster of independent restaurants, a renovated waterfront park, and several adaptive reuse projects in former industrial buildings have given St. George a commercial character more associated with early-gentrification Brooklyn than with the car-dependent suburban strip that dominates much of the borough. Whether the North Shore can sustain and build on that momentum — or whether the ferry dependency and the island's political culture will limit how far the market can run — remains an open question among brokers who are, for the moment, genuinely busy.