C4-4 Zoning District — New York City

This designation carries a distinctly commercial land-use pattern rather than a residential one. Commercial-and-office uses lead the recorded land use at 34%, ahead of mixed residential-commercial buildings at 22% and vacant land at 9%, and only 34% of the roughly 940 lots are recorded as residential at all. Yet the file still counts 9,827 homes across those lots — a large total concentrated on a minority of the parcels, which points toward sizable multi-unit buildings rather than housing spread evenly across the designation. Among recorded building classes, walk-up apartment buildings make up 14% of the stock. That imbalance between a mostly non-residential land-use file and a meaningful recorded homes count is one of the more distinctive patterns in this designation's records.

The construction record is mixed rather than dominated by one era: 67% of recorded buildings predate 1940, with a median construction year of 1931, though 14% of the stock dates from the 1945-to-1975 boom and 10% more has gone up since 2000 — together nearly a quarter of the recorded buildings postdating the prewar period, a real share of mid-century and recent construction layered on top of the older base. None of those shares cluster as tightly around a single generation the way some more uniformly prewar designations do; construction here has continued in real, separately recorded waves rather than stopping after one push.

The lots themselves run larger than a standard rowhouse parcel: a median of 5,395 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 28,350 square feet — sizes that allow for bigger commercial and mixed-use buildings. Buildings run to a median height of only 2 stories, though 7% of the recorded stock rises above 6 floors. Flood exposure stands out here: 11% of these lots sit inside the mapped federal Special Flood Hazard Area, and none are recorded inside a designated historic district. That combination of larger parcels and low-rise construction leaves visible room between what these lots could structurally support and what a 2-story median height actually represents on the ground.

The development ledger shows real recorded slack: 78% of lots record floor area below their allowance, with a median residual of 1.8 FAR — a sizable gap on lots already large enough to support bigger buildings. Given the land-use pattern and lot sizes described above, that recorded gap sits mostly on larger, non-residential parcels rather than on the housing stock itself. Whatever a specific parcel here might still add is set out, with its citation, on the rules tables above; each lot's own page carries the recorded figures for that parcel specifically.