R2 Zoning District — New York City

Among the designations profiled in this batch, this one carries the largest recorded scale — roughly 40,000 tax lots citywide — and a construction record that lands almost exactly on the line this profile draws between eras. The median construction year is 1940 itself, the defined boundary between prewar and postwar stock, with 49% of buildings predating that year and 39% dating to the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom — a near-even split between the two largest eras this file tracks. A further 3% of buildings have gone up since 2000, a modest but real recent layer on a designation whose median sits squarely at the historical dividing line.

Building class runs 81% one-family homes, with two-family homes at 13% and vacant land at 2%. Land use tracks closely: 94% one- and two-family use, 2% vacant land, and 1% multi-family walk-up use. Ninety-six percent of these roughly 40,000 lots are coded residential — one of the higher residential shares of any designation in this batch — and the file counts 47,087 units on record, a very large total reflecting the sheer scale of the designation as much as any density on individual lots.

Lots here run small and consistent: a median of 4,000 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching just 6,213 square feet — a tight range for a designation this large. Buildings sit at a median of 2 stories, and 0% of the recorded stock rises above 6 floors, keeping this large designation uniformly low-rise despite its scale.

Four percent of these lots sit inside the mapped federal flood zone, and 3% carry historic-district status, both modest overlays on a designation defined mainly by its scale and its era-straddling construction record. Floor-area headroom is broad: 88% of lots record built area below their recorded allowance, with a median residual of 0.3 FAR. The specific allowance behind that figure, with its citation, is set out in the rules tables above.

Scale changes how the era-straddling construction record above should be read. On a designation of only a few hundred lots, a median year landing exactly on 1940 might reflect a handful of buildings clustered near that date; across roughly 40,000 lots, it means genuinely large numbers of buildings on both sides of that line — a substantial prewar cohort and a comparable boom-era one standing on the same citywide file. The 88% of lots recording headroom, at a modest 0.3 FAR median residual, and the 4% flood share alongside a 3% historic-district share, describe a designation where the figures stay modest per lot but add up to some of the largest totals, 47,087 recorded homes among them, of any designation in this batch.