C4-5X Zoning District — New York City

The recorded stock under this designation, spread across roughly 200 lots, skews younger than the group's median. Twenty-seven percent of buildings have been recorded since 2000, the largest recent-construction share among these designations, while the median construction year sits at 1931 — already later than most nearby stock. Sixty percent of buildings predate 1940, so the picture is a prewar base with a substantial recent layer built on top of it, rather than a stock frozen at one moment. Only 9% of recorded buildings date from the 1945-1975 postwar boom, the quietest stretch in this file's construction history for this designation. Read together, those shares — 60% prewar, 9% boom-era, and 27% since 2000 — describe three distinct waves of building rather than one dominant era, with the most recent wave now the second-largest of the three.

The recorded classes and land uses both point toward commerce rather than housing. Store buildings lead the building-class file at 30%, garages add another 10%, and walk-up apartment buildings hold just 9%. By land use, commercial and office parcels are the largest single category at 35%, ahead of mixed residential-commercial parcels at 24% and public and institutional uses at 9%. Only 36% of lots are recorded as residential, though the file still counts 4,947 housing units on them — density concentrated on a minority of parcels rather than spread evenly across the roughly 200 lots. That combination — a garage share worth noting in its own right, at 10%, alongside a store-building lead at 30% — describes a designation organized more around commercial and service uses than around housing, even where housing exists.

Lots here run larger than many low-rise designations: a median of 5,141 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 27,500. Height stays modest against that footprint — a median of 3 stories, with 15% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors, a bit more vertical variety than the group's more uniform designations. Development headroom is broad: 86% of lots record floor area below their mapped allowance, at a median residual of 3 FAR — a wide, if unsurprising, gap given how much of the stock predates the modern code. That gap sits on lots large enough — a median of 5,141 square feet — that it is plausibly spread across genuinely underbuilt parcels rather than concentrated on a few odd-shaped remainders.

Two absences stand out in the record. Zero percent of these lots sit inside the mapped federal flood zone, and zero percent fall inside a designated historic district — both statements about the current federal and landmark maps rather than promises about any one parcel's history or future designation. The regulatory ceilings that go with this designation, including the floor-area and height limits behind that 86% headroom figure, are laid out with citations in the rules tables above. Nothing in either the flood record or the historic-district record here should be read as more than what it is: a snapshot of how two specific maps are drawn today, for these roughly 200 lots, as of the current file.