Astoria (North)-Ditmars-Steinway, Queens

Astoria (North)-Ditmars-Steinway is the largest neighborhood by tax-lot count in this set, with roughly 7,100 parcels on record — and the overwhelming majority of them are low-rise. 60% of the land-use mix is one- and two-family homes, the median recorded building height is 2 stories, and 0% of buildings are recorded above 6 floors. That combination of scale and uniform low height is distinctive even among the generally low-rise neighborhoods that surround it, where taller building classes register at least in small numbers. A lot count this large, paired with height this consistent, suggests a neighborhood built out in a fairly uniform pattern across a wide area rather than one shaped by scattered, larger-scale development.

The building-class mix reflects the same pattern: two-family homes make up 42% of recorded structures, walk-up apartment buildings 27%, and one-family homes 18%. Land use beyond the dominant one- and two-family category includes multi-family walk-ups at 27% and mixed residential-and-commercial parcels at 6%. 92% of all lots are classified as residential, the highest share of any category recorded here, carrying 23,755 units in total spread across thousands of small, similarly sized parcels — a sign of a neighborhood built house by house rather than through larger multi-lot assemblages.

The median recorded construction year is 1931, and 62% of buildings on file predate 1940. 26% date to the 1945-1975 postwar boom — a notably larger share than the prewar-dominated Manhattan neighborhoods profiled elsewhere in this set — while only 3% have gone up since 2000, making new construction a rare event against a stable, decades-old base.

1% of lots sit inside the federally mapped flood zone, and none are recorded inside a designated historic district. 81% of lots carry recorded floor area below the current allowance, with a median residual of 0.5 FAR points on those lots — meaningful headroom spread across a small median lot size of 2,350 square feet, with an upper range reaching 4,000 square feet, so any recorded capacity to add is distributed thinly across a very large number of modestly sized parcels rather than concentrated on a few larger ones.

A parcel-level PearlAudit record shows how a specific address compares to the neighborhood-wide figures above, which matters given how much a single block of two-family homes can differ in condition and age from the next. The neighborhood borders Astoria (Central), Astoria (East)-Woodside (North), East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Old Astoria-Hallets Point, each with its own distinct recorded mix of age, height, and land use.