New York Dog Sizes Track Neighborhood Income More Than Housing Space

In New York City, neighborhood income appears to tell us more about dog size than the amount of room people have at home. A ZIP code’s typical dog is heavier in wealthier areas, while housing measures add little explanatory power—and more floor area per home is associated with slightly smaller dogs.

That’s the central result of an analysis of city dog-license records by sociologist Kieran Healy. The question came from William Kornblum, an urban and community studies researcher and CUNY emeritus professor who studied Central Park users in the 1980s: do bigger dogs tend to live around the city’s less crowded edges, with smaller dogs in dense apartment neighborhoods?

The answer is mixed. Some peripheral neighborhoods do have larger dogs, but so do dense, expensive areas such as Park Slope, SoHo and the West Village. The broad pattern points more strongly to income than to geography or residential space. It’s an intriguing result, though the data describe estimated breed sizes across ZIP codes, not the weight of individual dogs or the choices of individual households.

Breed standards stand in for dog weights

The analysis starts with a limitation: New York City’s license records don’t include a dog’s weight. Owners do report breeds, however, so Healy matched those labels to weight ranges from American Kennel Club breed standards. The source was a 2020 table compiled by Tiago Filho covering 277 breeds.

Healy made adjustments where the city’s breed labels didn’t match the AKC data. For Dachshunds, he used the AKC’s 11-pound limit for miniature dogs when the license specified “Miniature.” For Pit Bulls, which he says the AKC doesn’t register, he used the United Kennel Club’s American Pit Bull Terrier standard. He then assigned each breed a typical weight: generally the midpoint of its standard range, or the listed figure where a standard supplied only one value.

That estimate is a useful way to compare breeds, not a measurement of the dogs themselves. Breed standards describe show dogs, and actual animals can be heavier or lighter. Still, the approach captures broad differences: a Great Dane is typically much larger than a Yorkie.

The method covers only about 60 percent of roughly 358,000 dog records. About 22 percent identify a crossbreed, around 10 percent have no breed recorded, about 6 percent list designer breeds such as Goldendoodles, Maltipoos and Morkies, and roughly 1.5 percent identify a Poodle without specifying its size. Healy leaves those records out rather than assign a weight that could be far off.

Coverage also varies by ZIP code. Breed size can be assigned to about half to two-thirds of licensed dogs in each area. It’s highest on Manhattan’s West Side and in parts of eastern Queens, and lowest in central Brooklyn. So the dogs included in the analysis aren’t distributed evenly across the city’s neighborhoods.

Neighborhood patterns don’t follow a simple density gradient

For ZIP code areas with at least 50 dogs whose breed size could be estimated, Healy calculated the median typical weight. The city’s MODZCTAs—ZIP code areas that merge some smaller zones—provide the geographic units.

Park Slope has the highest median, at 29 pounds. Lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn also rank among the areas with the largest dogs, alongside Woodlawn and City Island in the Bronx and the Rockaways in Queens. At the other end, the median is 12.5 pounds in much of the Bronx, southeast Queens, East New York and Brownsville.

The city’s results partly fit Kornblum’s hunch: some outer neighborhoods have bigger dogs. But the concentration of large dogs in dense Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods complicates the idea that more space alone determines dog size.

To compare the mix of breeds, Healy grouped estimated weights into five bands: Toy, up to about 9 pounds; Small, 9 to 22 pounds; Medium, 22 to 55 pounds; Large, 55 to 99 pounds; and Giant, over 99 pounds. The cutoffs are approximate, but give a view that a single median can hide.

Across the city, about one-quarter of dogs with known size are Toy, roughly one-third are Small, another quarter are Medium, 14 percent are Large and fewer than 2 percent are Giant. Toy dogs are especially common in the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Medium dogs cluster in some higher-income parts of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Large dogs show up most often on Staten Island, in the Rockaways and in parts of Manhattan. Giant dogs remain rare throughout the city.

At the borough level, Small dogs make up about a third of licensed dogs everywhere. The differences are more visible at the ends of the scale. Toy dogs account for about a third of the Bronx’s dogs, compared with about one-fifth in Manhattan. Large dogs make up 9 percent in the Bronx, 16 percent in Manhattan and 17 percent on Staten Island, the city’s least densely populated borough.

Income explains more than home size

To test whether the pattern was tied to household resources or available space, Healy combined dog-size estimates with neighborhood housing and income measures. He drew residential floor area and the share of homes in one- or two-family houses from the city’s PLUTO tax-lot database. Median rooms per home, homeownership and median household income came from the Census Bureau’s 2020–2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates.

The model compares average log breed weight across 177 ZIP code areas, adjusting for borough and the five neighborhood measures. Using logged weights makes differences easier to interpret proportionally, since a five-pound gap means more between small dogs than between large ones. Healy also compares areas at the 25th and 75th percentiles for each measure, holding the others constant.

Income is the clearest association. A ZIP code with median household income of $116,000 has dogs about 17 percent heavier, on average, than one at $67,000, after accounting for the other factors. In a separate partial regression analysis, each doubling of median household income is associated with dogs about 22 percent heavier.

Housing measures add much less. The share of homes in one- or two-family buildings and the homeownership rate have effects close to zero. Median rooms per home has a small positive estimate, but its interval includes zero. Floor area per home has a small negative association: moving from about 910 to 1,100 square feet corresponds to dogs about 3 percent smaller, at the same income level.

Staten Island stands out after the income and housing measures are taken into account: its dogs are estimated to be about 10 percent heavier than Manhattan’s. The interval is wide, spanning roughly 1 to 20 percent. Other boroughs don’t differ much from Manhattan in the model.

Income alone accounts for about 53 percent of the variation in typical dog size across ZIP codes. Adding borough raises that figure to 54 percent, while including all four housing measures brings it to 57 percent. Housing improves the model only modestly, and most of that contribution comes from the small floor-area relationship.

What the data can—and can’t—say

The income pattern makes practical sense, though the analysis doesn’t establish why it appears. Larger dogs cost more to feed and treat, can be harder to keep in buildings with pet weight limits, and may require paid dog-walking when their owners are at work. Those costs could make larger dogs more common where household incomes are higher.

Access to large parks may also matter. Someone living near Central Park, which NYC Parks estimates receives about 1.5 million dog visits a year—roughly 4,100 a day—might find it easier to keep a large dog even in a relatively small apartment. That’s a possible explanation, not something this ZIP code comparison can demonstrate.

The limits are substantial. The weights come from breed standards, not individual dogs; four in ten licensed dogs lack a usable breed size; and the records include licensed dogs only. Licensing rates may also vary with income. Most of all, ZIP code averages can’t show that higher-income people personally choose larger dogs. They show an area-level relationship, leaving household behavior unresolved.

Still, the results sharpen the original question. New York’s dog-size pattern isn’t simply a map of crowded apartments versus open space. Income is the stronger signal, while Staten Island provides some evidence that location and room may matter in particular places. Better data on individual dog weights and households would show whether those neighborhood patterns reflect owners’ choices, the costs of keeping larger dogs, or both.