East Village, Manhattan

East Village's tax-lot file is unusually concentrated in one building type. 54% of structures carry a walk-up apartment building classification, well above the next-largest classes on record: 10% elevator apartment buildings and 9% under a separate classification. Land-use codes echo the same pattern from a different angle — 41% of the roughly 2,300 lots are recorded as mixed residential-and-commercial use, and 33% as plain multi-family walk-up use, together accounting for most of the neighborhood's land-use file. 84% of lots carry a residential designation, and those lots hold 43,125 housing units between them, on a median lot size of 2,425 square feet — a small footprint carrying a large recorded unit count, which is consistent with a walk-up-dominated building-class file rather than a scattered mix of single-family and larger structures.

The age record is equally concentrated. The median building here dates to 1900, and 86% of the recorded stock predates 1940. Only 3% of buildings fall into the 1945-to-1975 postwar-boom years, and just 7% have been built since 2000. 16% of lots sit inside a mapped historic district, layering a design-review record on top of an already old building stock — a share worth checking address by address, since a historic-district designation on record changes what alterations a given lot can carry forward.

Height stays modest across the neighborhood: a median of 5 stories, with only 9% of buildings rising above 6 floors. Flood mapping reaches 3% of the neighborhood's lots — a record of the current federal map rather than a claim about the rest of the area. Development records show 61% of lots carrying recorded floor area below their zoning allowance, with a median residual of 0.4 in floor-area ratio, meaning that even where headroom exists on paper, it tends to be a thin margin rather than a wide one.

Lot sizes cluster tightly around that 2,425-square-foot median, with the upper end of the range reaching 7,124 square feet — a narrower spread than a neighborhood with a mix of rowhouse and assembled lots would show. Recorded zoning here runs to apartment-house districts alongside a commercial overlay, consistent with the low-rise, walk-up-heavy building-class mix and the thin 9% share of buildings over 6 floors. The file borders Gramercy and Greenwich Village directly, the Lower East Side and SoHo-Little Italy-Hudson Square nearby, and reaches across the river to Williamsburg, plus Midtown South-Flatiron-Union Square and Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village to the north and east.