C4-5D Zoning District — New York City

Across the roughly 220 tax lots carrying this designation, the recorded floor-area gap is unusually wide and unusually common at once. Ninety-three percent of lots show built floor area below their mapped allowance, and the median residual — 3.1 FAR — is one of the larger gaps this file records for any designation profiled here. That is a description of what stands against what the map allows, not a claim about what will get built next; assembly costs, small lot geometry, and ownership patterns all bear on whether a recorded gap ever closes, and none of those variables show up in a floor-area number by itself. What the records show plainly, and only that, is that most parcels carrying this designation have not yet caught up to their own mapped ceiling, whatever the reason.

The stock is old by the calendar the records keep. The median building here dates to 1920, and 79% of recorded structures predate 1940 — solidly prewar. Only 4% of buildings fall inside the 1945-1975 postwar boom that reshaped so much of the city, while 15% have been recorded since 2000, meaning modern construction has meaningfully outpaced the boom years on a designation this quiet. That pairing — a heavily prewar base with the boom years largely skipped and recent building still trickling in — describes a stock whose story was mostly written before 1940, with a modest postscript since 2000 and almost nothing built in between. Height tells a similarly quiet story: a median of 3 stories, with just 7% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors, on a designation where verticality was never much of the point.

The building classes on record lean commercial at the edges of a residential base: store buildings account for 26% of recorded classes, mixed residential-commercial buildings 19%, and walk-up apartment buildings 10%. By land use, mixed residential-commercial parcels lead at 38%, commercial and office parcels follow at 27%, and 8% of lots are recorded as parking — a meaningfully larger footprint for that use than most designations in this comparison set carry. Only 47% of lots are recorded as residential, itself a minority share, and the file counts 1,866 housing units across them. Lot size backs up the modest scale of the typical parcel here — a median of 3,740 square feet — even as a handful of larger holdings pull the upper range of lot sizes up toward 16,800 square feet.

Two recorded exposures round out the file. Just 1% of these lots sit inside the mapped federal flood zone, and 2% fall inside a designated historic district — both small shares. Neither figure describes a neighborhood untouched by risk or history, only what the current federal flood map and the current landmark rolls record for these specific parcels today; both of those maps can be redrawn, and a low percentage today is not a guarantee against either changing later. For the governing floor-area and height limits that apply to any one of these 220 lots, the rules tables above carry the exact figures with their citations; this page describes only what the records say already stands.