Elmhurst, Queens

Elmhurst's tax-lot file is large by any measure: roughly 7,400 parcels holding 37,332 recorded residential units. That scale plays out across a building stock split close to evenly between two eras: 47% of buildings predate 1940, and 30% date from the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom — the two periods together accounting for the bulk of what's on record, with only 7% built since 2000. The neighborhood borders Corona, North Corona, Jackson Heights, Woodside, Maspeth, Middle Village, and Rego Park, making it one of the more centrally connected neighborhoods in this part of Queens, with several distinct bordering areas recorded around it.

Land use splits between house-scale and apartment-scale construction: 45% of lots are recorded as one- and two-family use, and 37% as multi-family walk-up buildings, with 7% mixed residential-commercial. Building-class records show a similar lean toward walk-up stock, with walk-up apartment buildings the largest recorded class at 36%, followed by two-family buildings at 27% and one-family homes at 18%. That closeness between the one- and two-family share and the walk-up share describes a neighborhood evenly divided between house-scale and apartment-scale construction rather than dominated by either, a pattern that also shows up in the near-even prewar and postwar-boom age split noted above.

Buildings here run a median of 2.5 stories, taller on average than the strict two-story rowhouse blocks found elsewhere in the borough, though only 1% of recorded buildings rise above 6 floors. Overall, 91% of parcels are classed as residential. Lot sizes stay tight and consistent: a median of 2,375 square feet, with even the largest lots on record reaching only 4,000 square feet — a range narrow enough that few individual parcels stand out from the rest of the block. That gap between a taller median height and a still-small six-floor-plus share suggests added height is spread broadly across many parcels rather than concentrated in a handful of taller buildings.

None of Elmhurst's parcels are recorded inside a federally mapped flood zone or carry a historic-district designation, both facts about the current map and register rather than a claim about the neighborhood's past. At this scale, development capacity still runs meaningful: the recorded floor-area allowance above what's currently built covers 73% of lots, with a median residual of 0.4 FAR points per lot — real headroom spread across thousands of individual parcels rather than concentrated in a few large sites. Per-lot zoning and flood detail for any of Elmhurst's roughly 7,400 parcels is available in PearlAudit's property records.