R1-2 Zoning District — New York City

Of the three related low-rise designations profiled in this batch, this one carries the largest recorded scale — roughly 14,000 tax lots — and the most evenly balanced construction record. Thirty-three percent of buildings predate 1940, 38% date to the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom, and a further 10% have gone up since 2000, at a median construction year of 1950. Rather than one era dominating the file, as happens on several other designations profiled elsewhere in this set, three genuinely distinct construction periods each show up in real, comparable shares here.

The recorded building classes lean heavily toward detached and semi-detached housing: one-family homes account for 85% of the file, two-family homes a further 5%, and vacant land 7%. Land use runs a similar pattern, with 90% of lots recorded as one- and two-family use, 7% vacant land, and 1% public facilities and institutions. Ninety-one percent of these roughly 14,000 lots are coded residential, and the file counts 15,361 units on record — a large total that reflects the scale of the designation as much as its density.

Lots here run to a median of 6,150 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 12,250 square feet — smaller and tighter than the largest-lot designation in this trio, consistent with a somewhat denser single-family fabric. Buildings sit at a median of 2 stories, and 0% of the recorded stock rises above 6 floors, keeping the designation uniformly low-rise despite its scale.

A recorded 10% of lots here carry historic-district status — the highest share among the three related designations in this batch — layered on top of a construction record already split across three real eras. Four percent of lots sit inside the mapped federal flood zone, and floor-area headroom remains broad: 95% of lots record built area below their recorded allowance, with a median residual of 0.4 FAR. The specific allowance behind that figure, with its citation, is set out in the rules tables above.

Set against the other two related low-rise designations profiled alongside it, the scale of this one — roughly 14,000 lots — means its balanced construction record carries real weight rather than describing a handful of parcels. A median year of 1950 sitting between the 33% prewar and 38% boom-era shares is not an average smoothing over a lopsided file; it reflects three genuinely large cohorts of buildings standing side by side. The 95% of lots recording headroom, at a median residual of 0.4 FAR, plus the 10% carrying historic-district status, together describe a designation with both broad recorded development room and, on a real minority of its lots, landmark review layered on top of that room.