Rego Park, Queens

Rego Park's tax-lot records carry an unusual pairing: roughly 2,600 lots, yet 15,384 residential units recorded across them. Building-class records are led by one-family homes at 56%, with two-family homes at 25% and walk-up apartment buildings at 7% — a mix where lot count and unit count tell different parts of the same story, since a relatively small number of larger buildings account for a sizable share of the total units on top of a base of smaller homes. Reading the lot-count figures alone would suggest a neighborhood of houses; reading the unit total alongside them shows a denser residential base layered underneath that surface impression, the kind of gap that a simple building-class tally can miss entirely.

The neighborhood's age profile is prewar-leaning: the median building dates to 1938, with 57% of the stock recorded before 1940 against 25% built during the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom and just 3% since 2000. Land-use records back this up — 81% of lots are coded one- and two-family, 7% multi-family walk-up, and 4% commercial and office use — and 93% of all lots carry a residential classification overall. Together those figures describe a neighborhood that was substantially built out before the war and has changed only incrementally since, with the commercial and office share staying a minor part of the file rather than expanding into it.

Lot sizes run to a median of 2,424 square feet, with larger parcels reaching up to 5,365 square feet. Heights are mostly low, at a median of 2 stories, though 2% of the stock rises above six stories — a small but nonzero share, unlike several of the more uniformly low-rise neighborhoods nearby where that figure holds at zero. None of Rego Park's lots sit inside a mapped historic district, and 0% fall inside the federally mapped flood zone on record, which describes the current map rather than the absence of any risk to any specific address.

Development headroom is broad here: 75% of lots carry a recorded floor-area allowance above what's currently built, with a median residual of 0.3 FAR — meaning most parcels could add square footage under existing rules without needing any zoning change, at least on paper. Rego Park borders Corona, Elmhurst, Forest Hills, Glendale, and Middle Village, all profiled separately in the same tax-lot records covering this stretch of Queens, each with its own construction-era and density profile rather than sharing Rego Park's, and Forest Hills in particular shows a far larger recorded unit count on a similar-sized lot base.