Forest Hills, Queens

Forest Hills's records hold the largest recorded residential unit count among the neighborhoods profiled here: 47,160 units across roughly 7,500 tax lots. The median building dates to 1935, among the earliest median construction years in this group, with 53% of the stock recorded before 1940. Only 24% falls into the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom window and just 3% has gone up since 2000 — an old base carrying an outsized unit count, which points to a meaningful share of larger apartment buildings sitting among an otherwise prewar block pattern rather than a uniform stock of small homes. Few other neighborhoods in this file pair a construction-year median this early with a unit total this large.

Building-class records are led by one-family homes at 66%, with two-family homes at 16% and walk-up apartment buildings at 4%, while land-use records show 83% of lots coded one- and two-family, 4% multi-family walk-up, and 4% mixed residential and commercial. 94% of all lots carry a residential classification overall, and that gap between a lot count dominated by one-family homes and a unit count in the tens of thousands is the clearest signal in this file that a smaller number of larger buildings are doing a disproportionate share of the housing work. The mixed residential and commercial share, small as it is, is also one of the larger such shares recorded among this group of low-rise Queens neighborhoods.

Lots run to a median of 2,500 square feet, with larger parcels reaching up to 6,820 square feet. Recorded building heights are still mostly low, at a median of 2 stories, with just 1% of the stock rising above six stories — a modest but real share, higher than several neighboring areas where no lots clear that mark at all.

None of Forest Hills's lots sit inside a mapped historic district, and 0% register inside the federally mapped flood zone on record, a reflection of the current map rather than a claim about the land itself. Development headroom is comparatively tight here at 73% of lots, with a median residual of only 0.2 FAR — the smallest headroom margin among this batch of neighborhoods, meaning the typical lot has less recorded room to add floor area than most of its neighbors do, even with the neighborhood's large unit total. Forest Hills borders Corona, Glendale, Kew Gardens, and Rego Park, all profiled separately in the same tax-lot records, each with a different unit-to-lot pattern of its own.