R7A Zoning District — New York City

Construction under this designation reads as continuous rather than closed. The median year built is 1928, and 76% of recorded buildings predate 1940 — a solidly prewar base laid down before the current zoning code even existed. Only 8% of the stock dates from the 1945-1975 postwar boom, one of the thinner boom-era shares in the file, suggesting the blocks carrying this designation were largely built out before the postwar rebuilding wave reached them. What follows the boom picks back up, though: 11% of buildings on record have gone up since 2000, outpacing the entire boom period by a wide margin and pointing to a stock still being added to well into the twenty-first century, lot by lot, rather than through any single wave of construction.

The recorded building classes lean toward walk-up apartment buildings, 33% of the mix, with mixed residential-commercial buildings at 20% and elevator apartment buildings at 14% rounding out a stock that pairs rowhouse-era walk-ups with a meaningful commercial ground-floor presence. Land use tracks a similar pattern: 34% of lots are coded mixed residential-and-commercial, 28% multi-family walk-up, and 13% multi-family elevator, a split that puts mixed use ahead of pure multi-family walk-up use on the land-use ledger even though walk-up buildings lead the building-class count. Altogether 83% of lots are residential, and the tax-lot records count 176,322 homes across this designation — a large housing count relative to the roughly 11,000 lots that carry it, achieved through a mid-rise, closely built fabric rather than towers.

Lots here run modest but not tiny: a median of 2,517 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 13,727 square feet — room for larger assemblages at the upper end even where the typical lot stays close to rowhouse scale. Height matches the walk-up character described above: a median of 4 stories, with only 7% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors, keeping the skyline low and consistent across most of the footprint. The federal flood map places just 3% of these lots inside the mapped Special Flood Hazard Area, a small share of the designation's footprint and a statement about the regulatory boundary rather than a record of which individual lots have actually taken on water.

Room to build shows up broadly in the record: 81% of lots record floor area below their allowance, with a median gap of 1.7 FAR — a wide share of lots carrying some measure of unused capacity on paper, even if that capacity is unevenly distributed across a stock this size. A recorded 4% of these lots additionally sit inside designated historic districts, a modest landmark overlay compared to some designations in the file, leaving the great majority of the footprint outside landmark review. Each lot's own recorded floor area and height sit beside the governing rules, cited in full, in the tables above.