Greenpoint, Brooklyn

The records draw Greenpoint as a neighborhood of stairs rather than elevators. Walk-up apartment buildings are the single largest building class at 45% of the stock, two-family homes add 17%, and mixed residential-commercial buildings another 13%. The land-use file agrees: 47% of parcels are multi-family walk-ups, 21% hold one- and two-family buildings, and 16% pair ground-floor commercial with apartments above — the classic north Brooklyn main-street arrangement. The median building stands 3 stories, and structures taller than 6 floors amount to just 1% of the file. On roughly 4,800 tax lots holding 30,533 housing units, height is genuinely the exception rather than the rule. The pattern is legible on any side street: apartments over storefronts on the avenues, rows of flats behind them, and almost nothing tall enough to cast a long shadow.

That fabric is old. 88% of Greenpoint's recorded buildings predate 1940, and the median construction year is 1928. The wave of building that remade much of the outer boroughs between 1945 and 1975 barely touched it, contributing 3% of the stock, and buildings dating from 2000 or later account for 8%. New construction exists here, in other words, but it arrives as infill in a street wall the prewar builders had already closed — the records describe replacement and addition at the margins, not transformation.

For anyone reading the file closely, the interesting number is capacity. 71% of Greenpoint lots carry recorded floor area below what their zoning districts allow, with a median residual of 0.5 FAR — modest on any single lot, but unusually widespread. The lots themselves are small and consistent, at a median of 2,500 square feet with the top tenth beginning around 5,950. Only 8% of lots fall within a designated historic district, so most of that paper headroom faces no landmark layer, whatever other constraints an individual parcel may carry. That pattern — small lots, small gaps, nearly everywhere — matters more for modest enlargements than for ground-up development, and it is exactly the kind of signal a borough-wide average would bury.

Greenpoint's waterfront shows up in the flood file: 7% of lots sit inside the federally mapped special flood hazard area. That is a statement about FEMA's regulatory boundaries rather than a promise about where water will or will not go, but it is a real underwriting fact along Newtown Creek and the East River. The neighborhood is 86% residential by lot count and shares tax-map edges with Williamsburg and East Williamsburg. Every figure above — year built, floor area, flood status — resolves to individual parcels in the city's records, and PearlAudit publishes the per-lot versions of each.