M1-5 Zoning District — New York City

This designation's land-use file is overwhelmingly commercial, yet the housing recorded on it is not trivial. Only 15% of the roughly 360 tax lots that carry this designation citywide are coded residential — a clear minority — but the file still counts 4,180 homes on that slice, a substantial recorded population concentrated onto a small share of parcels. That pattern — thin residential coverage carrying real recorded density — repeats often enough among the more commercial designations in this batch to be worth naming directly here.

The recorded building classes lean toward office and commercial use: office buildings lead at 27%, store buildings follow at 19%, and garages add 13%. Land use tells an even more concentrated story — commercial-and-office parcels cover 50% of the file, half the designation on their own, with mixed residential-and-commercial use at 13% and industrial and manufacturing use at 12%. That land-use concentration, with one category holding half the file, is unusual among the designations profiled in this set, most of which split more evenly across several uses.

The recorded stock is substantially prewar: a median construction year of 1927, with 67% of buildings predating 1940. Only 12% falls inside the 1945-1975 postwar boom, while 14% has gone up since 2000 — modest but real recent activity layered onto an old base. Height runs to a median of 4 stories, with 25% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors, a meaningfully tall minority for a designation this old. Lots themselves run large, a median of 8,623 square feet with the largest recorded parcels reaching 35,667 — scale consistent with the commercial and office buildings recorded above.

23% of these lots carry recorded historic-district status, a real share layered on top of the commercial land-use file above, and 20% sit inside the mapped federal flood zone — a statement about the current regulatory map rather than a record of what has flooded. The city's tax-lot records carry no reliable development-capacity coverage for this designation, so no headroom or residual-FAR figure can be cited here; for the rules that actually govern floor area on these lots, the tables above carry the citation-backed numbers.

None of that changes what the rules tables above still govern for any one of these roughly 360 lots; this page tracks only what has actually been recorded as built.