M2-1 Zoning District — New York City

This designation's file carries some of the widest gaps in this comparison set. No reliable year-built coverage exists, no height coverage exists, and no floor-area-capacity coverage exists for these roughly 1,600 lots — three full stat families absent rather than partial. That is worth stating plainly rather than filling in with an estimate: where most designations in this file open with a construction date or a height figure, this one cannot honestly offer either, and at a scale of 1,600 lots that absence covers a genuinely large share of the citywide map.

What the file does carry describes a landscape of extremes rather than a uniform pattern. The median lot runs 7,450 square feet, yet the 90th percentile reaches 105,000 — a spread wide enough to suggest a mix of ordinary parcels and large assembled holdings sitting side by side under the same designation. Vacant land is the single largest recorded building class, at 23%, with warehouses at 18% and garages at 15% — a stock with meaningfully more open ground than built structure among its recorded classes, and no single occupied building type dominating the file the way one often does elsewhere. Even the lots well below the 90th-percentile mark still run larger, on the whole, than the typical residential parcel found in this comparison set.

By land use, industrial and manufacturing use covers 27% of the file, vacant land another 24%, and one- and two-family buildings 11% — a designation carrying a genuine residential thread despite its industrial core. Only 19% of these lots are recorded as residential, though the file still counts 6,273 units on record — a meaningful housing figure for a file whose largest recorded building class is vacant land rather than any occupied structure. A recorded 1% of lots also sit inside a designated historic district — a small but real presence of landmark status inside an otherwise industrial file, and a detail worth noting precisely because it is the kind of overlay easy to assume does not exist on manufacturing-coded ground.

The federal flood map places 40% of these roughly 1,600 lots inside the mapped Special Flood Hazard Area — a substantial share, worth reading alongside the wide lot-size spread and vacant-land share above, since exposure, ownership pattern, and construction history often travel together on ground like this. That is a statement about the regulatory flood boundary, not a record of which individual lots have taken on water. Each lot's own recorded class, land use, and flood status is tracked individually on its own page, which matters most here precisely because the citywide averages above cover so wide a range of underlying parcels.