Flatbush, Brooklyn

Flatbush concentrates 30,478 recorded homes onto roughly 2,700 tax lots, and the arithmetic of that ratio is unusual: it is produced by parcel size, not height. The median lot measures 4,000 square feet and the top decile reaches 12,000 — dimensions that hold six-story apartment houses and deep freestanding homes with equal ease — while the median building stands 2.5 stories and only 2% of buildings rise above 6 floors. Where much of southern Brooklyn spreads its housing across tens of thousands of small lots, Flatbush stacks its count onto fewer, larger ones, and that single geometric fact recolors every per-lot average in the file.

No single building type runs the neighborhood. One-family homes lead the class mix at just 24% of lots, two-family houses follow at 22%, and walk-up apartment buildings take 16% — a three-way balance rare in a borough of clear majorities. The land-use ledger repeats the theme: one- and two-family buildings occupy 46% of lots, but mixed residential-and-commercial parcels claim 18%, outranking pure walk-ups at 15%, which reflects how much of Flatbush's life runs along its commercial corridors with apartments overhead. The practical consequence of an even mix is variety at close range: a reader checking one parcel should expect its immediate neighbors to differ in building class more often than in most of the borough.

The stock is among the older files in the borough's records. 90% of buildings predate 1940, and the median construction year is 1924; the boom between 1945 and 1975 added 4%, and another 4% has arrived since 2000, so the building dates cluster tightly around the neighborhood's early decades. A thin landmark layer exists here too — 2% of lots fall within designated historic districts — enough to matter on the affected blocks without defining the neighborhood the way it does next door in the Ditmas Park file. Taken together, the age and scale columns describe apartment houses that arrived early and stayed: the big buildings here are prewar artifacts, not recent arrivals.

By the numbers, capacity remains. 79% of lots record floor area below their zoning allowance, with a median residual of 0.5 FAR, and 90% of lots are residential. On the current federal flood maps, 0% of lots carry a special flood hazard designation — a fact about where the mapped zone runs, not an assurance about drainage or storms. Flatbush borders East Flatbush, Midwood, Flatlands, and Prospect Lefferts Gardens; PearlAudit carries the full lot-level record for every parcel in the file.