It is bordered by Richmondtown to the north, Bay Terrace to the east, Eltingville to the west, and Great Kills Harbor to the south.

[8][9] Great Kills and Staten Island's other East Shore neighborhoods were mostly rural and dotted with shoreline resorts until the 1950s, after which the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge brought heavy residential growth from Brooklyn.

[1] The 17th-century Poillon-Seguine-Britton House near Great Kills Harbor was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, but was burned in 1989 and demolished in 1996.

[10] The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics selected what is now Great Kills Park as a "Historic Aerospace Site" in 2006, to commemorate a pioneering rocket launch in 1933.

On average during 2012–2016, one in sixteen South Shore residents (6%) were unemployed, compared to 6% in Staten Island and 9% in New York City.

Rent burden, or the percentage of renters who paid more than 30% of their income for housing, was 42% for the South Shore, compared to the boroughwide and citywide rates of 49% and 51%, respectively.

As of 2018[update], Great Kills and the South Shore were considered middle- to high-income relative to the rest of the city, and not gentrifying.

[3][18] In the New York City Council, Great Kills is part of District 51, represented by Republican Joseph Borelli.

[14]: 14 The concentration of fine particulate matter, the deadliest type of air pollutant, was 0.0066 milligrams per cubic metre (6.6×10−9 oz/cu ft) for the South Shore, 12% less than the city average.

[14]: 12 Ninety-five percent of South Shore adults ate some fruits and vegetables every day, which was more than the city's average of 87%.

[14]: 10  During late 2020, Great Kills spent weeks with the highest coronavirus rate of any New York City ZIP Code,[25][26] and in the center of a State-designated "Orange Zone" cluster of cases.

[29] A small portion of ZIP Code 10306, between Amboy Road and Siedenburg Park, is sometimes considered part of the Great Kills neighborhood.

24 in Great Kills is one of Staten Island's public intermediate schools (grades 6–8), named for the local educator and civic activist Myra S. Barnes (1880–1962).

24, and is one of 29 local victims memorialized by an eternal flame at St. Clare's, the neighborhood's prominent Catholic church and parochial school.

[38] Another thousand neighborhood children participate in sports teams organized through St. Clare's Church and its spin-off Great Kills Soccer Club.

The Great Kills Swim Club is the site of the 2015 movie Staten Island Summer written by comedian Colin Jost, who was a lifeguard there as a teenager.

[43] Great Kills was the site of the first middleweight boxing championship, when Nonpareil Jack Dempsey defeated George Fulljames in 1884 for the title.

[44] At the southeastern corner of the neighborhood is Great Kills Park, part of the Gateway National Recreation Area.

The railway serves the neighborhood via the Great Kills station, located at Giffords Lane near Amboy Road.