Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Williamsburg's file reads like two eras stacked on top of each other. The base layer is prewar: 70% of recorded buildings predate 1940, and the median year built is 1915. The top layer is strikingly recent, with 20% of the stock dating from 2000 or later — one recorded building in five. In between, the postwar decades barely register: construction from the boom years between 1945 and 1975 makes up just 5% of the file. The result is a neighborhood where a walk-up tenement and a new condominium tower can share a block front, and the records state the split plainly rather than averaging it away — it is simply what the year-built column shows when read across the whole map. Neither era erased the other; the file holds both at once.

The building-class mix carries the same signature. Walk-up apartment buildings remain the largest class at 35% of the stock, but condominiums now account for 10% — a class that barely registers in older north Brooklyn files — and mixed residential-commercial buildings for another 17%. Land use tells a parallel story: 35% of parcels are multi-family walk-ups, 29% combine residences with commercial space, and 11% hold one- and two-family buildings. The median building height is 3 stories, while 5% of buildings rise above 6 floors — a vertical tail worth noting in a neighborhood this old.

Zoning headroom still exists, but it is tighter than the prewar share might suggest: 57% of lots carry recorded floor area below their district allowance, and the median residual is a slim 0.3 FAR. Lot geometry hints at where the recent wave found room — the median lot is 2,484 square feet, but the ninetieth percentile reaches 8,970, a wide spread that includes the large former industrial parcels near the water. Historic-district coverage, meanwhile, is minimal at 1% of lots, leaving landmark review out of the picture almost everywhere. For an owner or a buyer that distinction matters: the remaining capacity is concentrated where the big lots are rather than spread evenly along every block, and the neighborhood average conceals exactly that.

The waterfront carries the flood story. 8% of lots fall inside the special flood hazard area on the current federal maps — a regulatory designation, not a flood history, and one worth confirming parcel by parcel rather than assuming in either direction. Williamsburg is 82% residential by lot count, holds 38,712 housing units on roughly 3,400 tax lots, and borders Greenpoint, East Williamsburg, and South Williamsburg on the Brooklyn side. Each figure above is an aggregate of the city's lot-level property records, and it is the lot-level detail that settles the questions the averages leave open.