M1-5/R7D Zoning District — New York City

Landmark review sits heavily on top of the zoning map for this designation. 67% of its roughly 45 tax lots carry recorded historic-district status, one of the higher shares in this comparison batch, and the stock underneath is the oldest of any designation profiled here: a median construction year of 1900, with 86% of buildings predating 1940. Only 5% of the recorded stock falls inside the 1945-1975 postwar boom, and just 10% has gone up since 2000 — a designation where nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century construction still dominates the file almost completely.

44% of these lots record some floor area below their allowance, but the median residual among them is 0 FAR — meaning where headroom exists on record, it tends to be vanishingly thin rather than substantial, a different pattern from designations elsewhere in this batch where headroom runs both broad and deep. The governing floor-area figures behind that gap are set out, with citations, in the rules tables above.

By recorded class, elevator apartment buildings lead at 31%, store buildings follow at 13%, and office buildings add another 13%. Land use splits evenly between mixed residential-and-commercial use and commercial-and-office use, 32% each, with multi-family elevator use recorded on 27% of lots. 61% of lots are recorded as residential, and the file counts 364 homes on them.

Height runs to a median of 5 stories, with 28% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors — a genuinely tall profile layered on top of the oldest stock in this batch. Lots run to a median of 2,508 square feet, with the largest recorded parcels reaching 9,600. None of the lots, 0%, sit inside the mapped federal flood zone, on the record as it stands today.

The pairing of a heavy historic-district overlay and a genuinely tall recorded stock, both described above, is unusual among the designations profiled in this batch. Landmark review here plainly has not kept the recorded stock low-rise, and 67% of these roughly 45 lots carry that historic-district status in the first place. Land use splits close to evenly across three categories, mixed residential-and-commercial and commercial-and-office use each recorded on 32% of lots and multi-family elevator use on a further 27%, a three-way file with no single use holding a clear majority. Lots themselves run tight, a median of 2,508 square feet against a 9,600-square-foot 90th percentile, ground compact enough that the tall, old buildings recorded above read as a genuinely built-up fabric rather than a scattering of towers on oversized parcels.