Long Island City-Hunters Point, Queens

Long Island City-Hunters Point's file starts with water. Records place 27% of its roughly 1,300 tax lots inside a federally mapped flood zone — a fact about the regulatory map, not a claim about what has or hasn't flooded on any given lot. The rest of the parcel record describes a working waterfront edge more than a purely residential quarter: only 54% of lots are classed as residential at all, with the balance recorded as industrial, commercial, and mixed uses on the tax rolls. The neighborhood borders Queensbridge-Ravenswood-Dutch Kills and Sunnyside within Queens, and sits across the water from Manhattan's Murray Hill-Kips Bay and Upper East Side-Lenox Hill-Roosevelt Island.

The land-use record reinforces that mix. Mixed residential-commercial buildings account for 20% of lots, industrial use for 19%, and multi-family walk-up buildings for 15% — a three-way split unlike the single-family-dominated rolls found in many residential neighborhoods. Building-class records echo the same pattern: walk-up apartment buildings make up 14% of lots and two-family buildings 11%, with no single class approaching a majority. The typical parcel is also unusually large, with a median lot size of 3,992 square feet and the larger lots on record reaching as much as 33,613 square feet — sizes consistent with industrial and larger mixed-use sites rather than rowhouse-scale plots. That spread between the median and the largest-on-record lot size is wider than the tight, uniform lot patterns typical of purely residential rowhouse blocks.

Age adds another layer to the record. The median building here dates to 1931, and 63% of the recorded stock predates 1940 — solidly prewar despite the industrial framing above. Only 10% falls into the 1945-to-1975 postwar-boom years, but 22% of buildings on record date from 2000 or later, a newer-construction share standing well apart from the neighborhood's otherwise prewar median. A recorded historic district covers 4% of lots, a modest but real share of the built fabric carrying that designation. Taken together, the age record describes two distinct waves of building activity on the same set of blocks: an early-20th-century industrial and rowhouse base, and a recent wave of new construction layered on top of it.

Height and capacity round out the picture. The median building stands 3 stories, and 12% of recorded buildings rise above 6 floors — taller, on average, than the walk-up rowhouse blocks common elsewhere in the borough. Development capacity remains largely untapped: 75% of lots carry a recorded floor-area allowance above what's currently built, with a median residual of 1 FAR point per lot. That combination of recent construction, added height, and untapped floor area is consistent with a neighborhood still being actively built out rather than one that reached its final form decades ago. Per-lot detail on flood status, land use, and zoning capacity for any of the roughly 1,300 parcels here is available in individual property records.