R7B Zoning District — New York City

Few designations in the file carry a fabric this old. The median construction year is 1909, and 83% of recorded buildings predate 1940 — among the deeper prewar shares in this batch, describing blocks that were substantially complete before the current zoning framework was written. Only 8% of the stock dates from the 1945-1975 postwar boom, and just 6% has been built since 2000, meaning construction here largely stopped generations ago and has barely resumed since; recent decades have added only a trickle to what earlier builders left standing. What stands today is overwhelmingly what was built before the modern zoning code existed, block after block, with little sign of the postwar or contemporary construction found elsewhere in this file.

The recorded classes are dominated by walk-up apartment buildings at 45%, with two-family homes at 16% and elevator apartment buildings at 11% filling out the rest — a mix weighted toward attached, mid-rise housing rather than single-family or high-rise construction. Land use runs even more concentrated: 46% of lots are coded multi-family walk-up, 26% one- and two-family, and 10% multi-family elevator, one of the more uniform land-use splits in this batch, with commercial and office-oriented uses barely registering by comparison. Residential use covers 91% of lots, and the tax-lot records count 45,696 homes across the roughly 3,400 lots carrying this designation, a substantial housing count for a footprint this size.

Lots run small and consistent: a median of 2,156 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 10,000 square feet — a tighter spread than several other designations profiled in this file, and one of the more uniform lot fabrics in this batch. Height stays low across the stock, a median of 4 stories with only 3% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors, keeping the designation's skyline close to the rowhouse pattern its land-use figures describe. The federal flood map places 5% of these lots inside the mapped Special Flood Hazard Area, a modest share of the footprint and, like any flood figure, a statement about the regulatory boundary rather than a record of actual water exposure.

What sets this designation apart is the historic overlay: 36% of its lots sit inside designated historic districts, a landmark layer over the zoning found on well over a third of the recorded footprint here, among the heavier such overlays in this batch. Room to build appears on 70% of lots, with a median residual of 0.7 FAR — present but thin, on lots this small and this old, where adding capacity would mean working around both a tight lot fabric and landmark review. The governing floor-area and height figures for any one of these lots carry their legal citations in the tables above.