Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

So much for the idea that New York City is home to cranky, crotchety, chronically unhappy people who are never, ever O.K. with anything. A new survey found that 84 percent are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the city as a place to live. Only 4 percent said they were not at all satisfied.

The grins were almost as wide when they were asked if they liked the specific part of the city they call home: 82 percent said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their neighborhood. Good addresses everywhere.

Vin Cipolla, the president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, which commissioned the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion to do the survey, sounded happy that everybody was happy. And, at first, he also sounded surprised about the findings.



“There’s a lot of dark reporting and dark news that comes out of New York,” he said, “but it’s the only place we would want to be, so in that way, we are satisfied, and maybe given the times we’re living in, there’s really no surprise. Compared with other parts of the nation, unemployment is lower here. In terms of the foreclosure rate nationally, we’re No. 72 out of 366 markets. So relatively speaking, we’re faring a little better.”

No doubt there will be more happy talk on Thursday at a conference on the city’s livability that the society is sponsoring. Mr. Cipolla plans to open the “Summit for New York City” by saying that as a Manhattanite, he is happy that Manhattan emerged as the friendliest borough in the survey, though not by much: 28 percent said it was friendliest, trailed by Brooklyn (24 percent) and Queens (23 percent). The Bronx and Staten Island were tied with 7 percent each. Eleven percent said they were not sure. (One of the panels at the conference, on the demographics of a changing city, will be moderated by Sam Roberts, a reporter for The New York Times.)

Other borough-by-borough breakdowns? “You find out Brooklyn is the most activist borough, Manhattan is the most preservation oriented, Manhattanites are more inclined to support small business in their neighborhood, and Manhattanites and Queens residents are more inclined to buy things in made in New York City,” he said.

That last point referred to a question that asked, “When you see a ‘made in New York’ label, which comes closer to your view?” There were three choices. “You are contributing to the local economy” got 57 percent, while 29 percent chose “You are paying too much for the product.” Fourteen percent said they were unsure.

The survey did find some unhappiness among the 1,005 adults who were questioned (they were chosen at random and interviewed by telephone between Sept. 29 and Oct. 6). Almost 40 percent of Bronx residents surveyed, and almost a quarter of those from Queens and Brooklyn, said they would move out of the city if they could.

Brooklyn residents were the least happy with their parks, Mr. Cipolla said, and those in the Bronx were the least satisfied “right across the board — about schools, about safety, about what’s happening in their communities.” The survey found, for example, that 47 percent of Bronx residents considered police protection fair or poor, and 43 percent said the quality of shopping in their neighborhoods was fair or poor.

All of that, he said, makes the Bronx “an extraordinary primer for more intensified, targeted investment.”

“It suffers,” he said, “and I can’t help but think about how that correlates to national or federal policy as a whole. We have encouraged sprawl development outside our cities, and we haven’t done well by our cities for decades.”

Edwin Torres, associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave the society a $150,000 grant for the conference and the survey, said that disparities in happiness had to do with income and borough. All in all, Staten Island was the happiest borough (95 percent of its residents said they were “happy” or “very happy”), followed by Queens (93 percent), Manhattan (91 percent), Brooklyn (89 percent) and the Bronx (86 percent).

But the survey found that 12 percent of Latinos and 10 percent of African-Americans described themselves as not very happy, compared with 5 percent of whites.