M1-4A/R8A Zoning District — New York City

Headroom on this designation runs both wide and deep, a combination not every designation profiled here can show. Across the 59 tax lots that carry it citywide, 98% record floor area below their allowance — already an unusually high share — and the typical shortfall is not a marginal one: a median residual of 4.2 FAR. That pairing, near-universal incidence and a wide median gap, means the recorded stock sits well under its allowance almost everywhere the designation is mapped, rather than in a handful of outlying parcels. The rules tables above carry the governing floor-area figures for any specific lot; this page describes only what is already standing beneath that gap.

The recorded building stock leans toward walk-up apartment buildings, which make up 20% of building classes, with garages at 12% and condominiums an equal 12% — a working mix of housing and service structures rather than a single dominant type. By land use, mixed residential-and-commercial parcels lead at 27%, multi-family walk-up use follows at 19%, and one- and two-family use adds 12%, a land-use file that tracks closely with the building-class mix above it. 63% of lots are recorded as residential, and the file counts 791 homes on them — a modest but real population for a designation of this size.

The stock is substantially prewar: a median construction year of 1928, with 74% of recorded buildings predating 1940. The postwar boom left comparatively little mark, at 7% of the stock, while 17% of buildings date from 2000 or later — more recent construction than the boom years produced, on record. Height stays low across most of the stock, a median of 2 stories, with 13% of buildings recorded above 6 floors. Read together, the age and height figures describe a stock that finished most of its growth well before the postwar building boom reshaped so much of the city.

Lots run to a median of 3,750 square feet, with the largest recorded parcels reaching 12,500 square feet — modest ground for the depth of headroom recorded above. The federal flood map places 29% of these lots inside the mapped flood zone, a meaningful minority exposure rather than a dominant one, and a statement about the current regulatory map rather than a record of what has actually flooded. None of the lots, 0%, carry historic-district status on record. Each lot's own recorded figures, and the governing FAR that comes with them, live on its own page next to the citations in the rules tables above.

Set against the other designations profiled in this batch, this one stands out for combining broad-and-deep recorded headroom with an already resident-heavy, low-rise fabric — a pattern that shows up less often than either trait on its own.