St. Albans, Queens

Among the neighborhoods profiled in this part of Queens, St. Albans stands out for one figure most of its neighbors record as zero: 3% of its roughly 12,000 tax lots fall inside a recorded historic district. That is a small share in absolute terms, but among a cluster where the same field mostly reads 0%, it stands out as the highest reading in the group. St. Albans is also one of the larger neighborhoods by lot count here, with 16,291 housing units recorded across those parcels — a scale that puts it among the more populous entries in the set.

The building stock skews toward the older end of the range. The median dated structure went up in 1935, and 60% of recorded buildings predate 1940, one of the higher prewar shares in this part of the borough. Only 27% date from the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom, and just 3% were built in 2000 or later — a construction history concentrated well before the postwar wave that reshaped many neighboring blocks, and largely finished before the modern zoning framework existed at all.

One-family homes make up 69% of recorded building classifications, with two-family homes at 23% and a small 2% share carrying a vacant-land classification. Land-use records show a comparable residential concentration: 92% of lots classified as one- and two-family use, with 2% recorded for mixed residential and commercial purposes and 2% vacant. Lots here run smaller than several of St. Albans' neighbors, with a median of 3,045 square feet and larger lots topping out at 5,000 square feet, and building heights hold at a median of 2 stories with no recorded structure reaching above 6 stories anywhere in the file.

Development headroom is high here: 93% of lots carry recorded floor area below their current district allowance, with a median residual of 0.3 FAR, among the more open capacity readings in this cluster of neighborhoods. Federal flood mapping places 0% of St. Albans lots inside the mapped floodplain, a statement about the current regulatory map rather than a claim about the land's history one way or the other.

The neighborhood sits among a dense ring of similar communities — Hollis, Jamaica, Queens Village, Laurelton, Cambria Heights, South Jamaica, Baisley Park, and Springfield Gardens (North)-Rochdale Village — each with its own separately recorded profile in this data set. Few entries in the group border as many others as St. Albans does, a reflection of its position near the center of this part of southeast Queens.