R5A Zoning District — New York City

On lots carrying this designation, two-family homes set the tone of the recorded stock. Two-family building classifications lead at 46%, ahead of walk-up apartment buildings at 28% and one-family homes at 18% — a class order that reads more like a rowhouse-and-semi block than an apartment corridor. One- and two-family land use covers 64% of these roughly 4,100 tax lots, with multi-family walk-up use adding 29% and vacant land a further 2%. That combination — two-family classes leading the building mix and one- and two-family parcels leading the land-use mix at a similar rate — describes a designation where the recorded categories agree with each other rather than pulling in different directions. Construction here is old: 77% of buildings on record predate 1940, and the median construction year is 1925. Only 11% date from the 1945-1975 postwar boom, and just 8% have gone up since 2000 — a stock that was substantially finished before the middle of the twentieth century and has changed only lightly since.

Height stays low across the board: a median of 2 stories, with 0% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors. Lots run tight and consistent, at a median of 2,517 square feet, with even the largest recorded parcels reaching only 5,000 square feet — ground scaled to the low, small-building pattern the class mix already describes. Across the designation, 95% of lots are coded residential, and the file counts 11,089 homes on record, a modest total that matches the small-lot, low-rise fabric rather than any dense apartment corridor. That pairing of a high residential share with a comparatively modest homes count is what a genuinely low-rise designation looks like on paper — breadth of coverage rather than height or density carrying the housing total.

The development ledger shows most of these lots carrying some unused capacity: 87% record floor area below their allowance, though the median residual is a modest 0.7 FAR — real headroom, but not much of it on any single small parcel, in keeping with ground platted this tightly. None of the recorded lots, 0%, sit inside a designated historic district, and only 3% fall inside the mapped federal flood zone, a small minority by the numbers on record. Both figures describe the regulatory and preservation maps as recorded, not a forecast of what happens to any one address.

Each of the roughly 4,100 tax lots carrying this designation has its own page with these figures broken out individually — building class, year built, lot size, and flood status among them. The floor-area and height rules that actually govern the designation, with their citations, sit in the tables above, alongside whatever else the record shows for a given parcel.