Midtown South-Flatiron-Union Square, Manhattan

Midtown South-Flatiron-Union Square's land-use file runs half commercial: 50% of the roughly 1,200 tax lots are recorded as commercial-and-office use, with 30% mixed residential-and-commercial and 9% multi-family elevator use. Building-class records lean the same way — 38% of structures are classed as office buildings, 15% under a separate classification, and 13% as elevator apartment buildings. Only 43% of lots carry a residential designation, and those lots still hold 35,961 housing units on a median lot size of 4,419 square feet, a larger median footprint than a typical rowhouse block, consistent with a land-use file weighted toward commercial and office space rather than ground-up residential construction.

Height runs tall for a Manhattan tax-lot file: a median of 7 stories, with 54% of buildings rising above 6 floors, more than half the recorded stock. A third of lots, 33%, sit inside a mapped historic district, layering design review over a large share of the neighborhood's commercial and mixed-use buildings — a designation that governs what any given office or loft building on record can alter, regardless of its current use.

The age record still runs prewar in bulk despite the commercial character: a median construction year of 1912, and 87% of the recorded stock predates 1940. Only 4% of buildings fall into the 1945-to-1975 postwar-boom years, and 8% have been built since 2000 — office towers and converted loft buildings here are mostly old on record, whatever their current use, and the 1,200-lot file carries that age forward into its zoning and historic-district status alike.

No lots here fall inside a mapped flood zone — 0% on file, a statement about the current flood map rather than a claim about drainage or storm exposure on the ground. Development records show 69% of lots carrying recorded floor area below their zoning allowance, with a median residual of 3.2 in floor-area ratio, a wide unused margin sitting alongside the neighborhood's older, mostly prewar building stock. Lot sizes vary well past that 4,419-square-foot median, with the upper end of the range reaching 14,813 square feet, reflecting the assembled commercial parcels mixed in with smaller residential lots. The file borders Chelsea-Hudson Yards and West Village to the west, East Village and Greenwich Village to the south, Gramercy and Murray Hill-Kips Bay to the east, and Midtown-Times Square to the north — a ring of neighborhoods that each carry a noticeably different land-use and building-age mix on record.