Far Rockaway-Bayswater, Queens

The class order is the first thing to notice: two-family buildings make up 40% of what's recorded in Far Rockaway-Bayswater, ahead of the 35% one-family share, with walk-up multi-family buildings adding another 9% — a class mix skewed toward attached and multi-unit construction rather than detached houses. Land-use records track that pattern: 75% of lots fall under one- and two-family residential use, 9% under multi-family walk-up use, and 8% carry a vacant designation. Construction here centers on a median year of 1955, which lands inside the 1945-to-1975 postwar building boom; 34% of the recorded stock dates from that window, against 33% built before 1940 and 23% recorded since 2000 — a fairly even three-way split across the neighborhood's construction eras.

Flood exposure is considerable by federal flood mapping: 42% of the neighborhood's lots sit inside a mapped special flood hazard area. That figure describes a regulatory boundary on a map, not a record of which individual lots have taken on water — the two aren't the same thing. Lot sizes here run wider than the surrounding blocks might suggest: a median of 3,955 square feet against lots reaching as much as 10,073 square feet at the top of the range, meaning a real share of parcels are recorded several times larger than the neighborhood's typical footprint. That map boundary sits over a neighborhood whose median building, built in 1955, predates the more recent generation of flood-zone updates by decades.

Height is modest across the file: the median recorded building runs 2 stories, and none are recorded above the 6-story line that separates mid-rise construction from the rest. That low profile doesn't mean the district allowance is used up — 85% of lots carry recorded floor-area headroom below what their zoning permits, with a median residual FAR gap of 0.4, among the wider margins recorded in this corner of Queens. The top recorded districts here fall within ordinary low-rise and apartment-house categories, not a manufacturing or special-purpose designation. No lots carry a historic-district designation on record; that's an absence in the file, not a statement that nothing on these blocks is old or worth preserving.

Residential use covers 86% of the roughly 6,000 lots, and the file counts 23,713 units inside them, a sizable base packed into a neighborhood this size — among the larger unit counts recorded in this corner of Queens, reflecting the class mix's lean toward attached and multi-family construction described above. Far Rockaway-Bayswater sits immediately north of Rockaway Beach-Arverne-Edgemere, a neighboring file whose flood and construction figures — recorded on the same municipal tax-lot standard — make a useful side-by-side comparison to the numbers gathered here.