C5-5 Zoning District — New York City

The flood record is the fact that sets this designation apart. Of the roughly 290 lots carrying it, 24% sit inside the mapped Special Flood Hazard Area — a considerably larger share than most zoning designations carry, and a records fact worth checking on any specific address rather than assuming from the district alone. A recorded 9% of these lots additionally sit inside a designated historic district, layering landmark review on top of flood exposure for a real slice of the parcels, so a meaningful minority of this designation's lots carry two separate regulatory overlays at once. That double exposure is worth noting on a designation of this size, where flood status and landmark review do not always line up on the same parcels.

Above that ground, the buildings run tall: a median height of 13 floors, with 64% of the recorded stock rising above 6 floors. That height sits on old bones — the median construction year is 1920, and 69% of buildings predate 1940 — so most of the height on record was built well before the current zoning code, with the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom adding a further 14% and construction since 2000 adding 11% more. Height and age travel together here: this is not a designation where the tallest buildings on record are also the newest. Neither of those later eras has meaningfully outpaced the other on the file as it stands.

By recorded class, office buildings lead at 28%, condominiums follow at 21%, and store buildings add 14%. Land use runs 45% commercial and office and 36% mixed residential-and-commercial, with multi-family elevator buildings recorded on 8% of lots. Residential use covers 44% of the lots, and the file counts 23,668 homes — a substantial number for a designation whose primary recorded use, by land area, is commercial, and evidence that the residential minority of lots here still carries meaningful density. The remaining recorded classes are split across smaller categories not individually broken out here, consistent with a designation built for commercial density rather than a single dominant use.

Lots run a median of 6,834 square feet, with the largest lots on record reaching 31,469 square feet. Development records show 51% of lots carrying floor area below their allowance, though the median residual is a modest 0.3 FAR — broad but shallow headroom, on ground that is already largely built to its recorded lines. That gap between broad coverage and shallow depth is itself informative: many lots technically carry some recorded room, but not much of it. Each lot's specific flood, height, and development figures sit on its own page, weighed against the governing numbers the rules tables above set out for the designation as a whole.