A person wears a medical face mask in New York | Getty Images New York City's most crowded neighborhoods are often hardest hit by coronavirus

New York City neighborhoods where people are living in the most cramped quarters have been a tinderbox for the spread of the coronavirus, according to a POLITICO analysis of health department data.

In neighborhoods that have become virus hot spots in recent weeks — such as Corona in Queens, Borough Park in Brooklyn and Fordham in the Bronx — as many as 1 in 5 residents live in crowded apartments, generally defined by the city as more than one person per room. Among the 25 zip codes with the highest amount of cases, 16 were also among those with the highest rates of overcrowding, according to POLITICO's analysis, which cross-referenced city health department data with census statistics.


Elected officials and community leaders are raising alarms about the conditions and pushing the city to give space to isolate people who aren’t able to do so at home. Health experts say crowded apartments, most of which are occupied by low-income and immigrant families, may be contributing to the spread of the illness, which has already claimed more than 5,600 lives in the five boroughs.

The city’s health department has advised that people who have the virus or are showing symptoms and don’t need hospitalization to self-isolate at home. But for New Yorkers sharing close quarters with extended family or multiple roommates, that can be an almost impossible task.

“You have such high density and families doubled up and tripled up in one apartment. It spreads like wildfire,” said City Council Member Diana Ayala, who represents parts of the Bronx that have high rates of both overcrowding and Covid-19 cases. “People get sick and they don’t know what to do.”

In Highbridge in Ayala’s district, where one zip code has seen nearly 1,000 cases, nearly 19 percent of households were considered crowded and 8 percent severely crowded, according to Census data. In a zip code covering Elmhurst with upwards of 1,700 positive cases, 20 percent of households were in crowded apartments and about 9 percent severely crowded, where there could be two or more people per room. Other areas with overlap include Jackson Heights in Queens, Midwood and parts of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and sections of the north Bronx.

The coronavirus hit Pascual Peña’s Washington Heights apartment in mid-March, when his 77-year-old father fell ill. His parents, a sister, two uncles and their wives live together in a four-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood, where they all share one bathroom.

“It was really difficult to contain it,” he said, noting several people in the household have since become ill or shown mild symptoms.

For Woodside resident Rajesh Shreshta, who shares a two-bedroom apartment with three other people and who began showing Covid-like symptoms last week, steering clear of his roommates has been a delicate balancing act: avoiding the kitchen whenever his roommates are around and more frequent cleaning of common spaces.

“We’re trying our best, but it’s very hard,” Shreshta said. “Because you know the apartment is very small and we were already adjusting [before the coronavirus].”

Medical professionals said crowded housing conditions could be a contributing factor in why some communities have been particularly vulnerable to the outbreak, in addition to health and economic disparities.

“[Low-income people] tend to live in more crowded conditions and they may have multiple generations in a small apartment where the most vulnerable people — you know, older people with preexisting conditions — are living with the rest of the family,” Irwin Redlener, a public health and disaster preparedness expert and professor at Columbia University, said last week on WNYC’s "The Brian Lehrer Show."

“How do you socially isolate yourself? If one person gets sick then they get sick,” Steven Corwin, president and CEO of the NewYork-Presbyterian hospital system, said in a recent interview. “People don’t have the ability to go to the country or to live in a large apartment.”

Overcrowding is a growing phenomenon citywide, and lays bare the dire extent of the city’s affordable housing shortage. A 2015 report from city Comptroller Scott Stringer found that between 2005 and 2013, crowded dwelling units across the five boroughs rose 19 percent, up to a total 272,533 homes. Severe crowding surged 45 percent during the same period. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development defines a crowded apartment as one in which there’s more than one person per room and a severely crowded apartment as one with more than 1.5 people per room, on average.

“Crowding is an established predictor of homelessness and a critical indicator of negative health, safety and economic household risk factors,” the report said.

The problem has spurred elected officials and communities hard hit by the pandemic to push the city to place people who can’t properly self-isolate at home in vacant hotel rooms and other available spaces.

“People are trying their best to be isolated, but they don’t have a separate room, so what can you advise?” said Nabaraj KC, a member of the local community board in Jackson Heights who is also active in the local Nepali community. “You can’t provide a separate room for them, they can’t pay for a hotel room … we don’t have any answer for them. It’s a big dilemma.”

“From the very beginning when I heard about the crisis, I just knew that this was going to make a bad problem worse,” said City Council Member Daniel Dromm, referring to housing conditions in the Queens neighborhood he represents. “We need to get [the city] to deal with the overcrowding problem because it’s just going to spread the virus even more and make this last a longer time.”

Sally Goldenberg contributed to this report.