East Flatbush-Remsen Village, Brooklyn

Remsen Village's tax-lot records describe a neighborhood with room to grow on paper that has not, in recent years, grown much: 90% of the roughly 3,500 lots here carry floor area below their district allowance, with a median residual FAR of 0.8. A lot can carry a residual FAR like this for any number of reasons the tax roll does not record — the figure describes capacity, not plans. Set against that capacity, construction since 2000 accounts for just 1% of recorded buildings, a distinctive pairing of recorded capacity against recorded activity. The two facts sit side by side without explaining each other.

The area's building stock is mostly older, but not uniformly so: a median construction year of 1931, with 59% of buildings predating 1940. The postwar boom of 1945 to 1975 added 27% of the recorded stock, a meaningful second wave of construction after the initial prewar building period. Between the prewar share and the postwar-boom share, these two eras account for most of the building activity the roll records here.

Building-class records lean toward walk-up apartment buildings, recorded on 41% of buildings, ahead of two-family homes at 34% and one-family homes at 12%. Land use splits almost evenly between one- and two-family use at 46% and multi-family walk-up use at 41%, with mixed residential and commercial use at 6%. That near-even land-use split — house-scale parcels matched almost lot for lot by walk-up buildings — is a fairly balanced mix on record.

Height stays low, with a median of 2 stories and 0% of buildings recorded above 6 stories. Lots run a median of 2,500 square feet, with a 90th percentile of 3,600 square feet. 94% of parcels carry a residential designation, and the roll counts 14,753 housing units. No lots here are mapped inside a federal flood hazard area on record. Remsen Village borders Brownsville, Canarsie, Crown Heights (South), East Flatbush-Rugby, and East New York-New Lots — five neighboring profiles, each with its own recorded construction-era mix.

Walk-up and two-family buildings — elevator-less multi-family structures and two-unit houses, in the city's classification — together cover three-quarters of Remsen Village's recorded stock. One-family homes make up the smallest of the three leading categories here, consistent with the 46% one- and two-family land-use share recorded above. Read against the 90% headroom figure, the mix suggests most of Remsen Village's unused floor area sits on its walk-up and two-family lots rather than its smaller one-family share.