R8 Zoning District — New York City

Lots under this designation run to a median of 5,017 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 18,147 square feet — larger, on the whole, than most other designations covered in this batch, and large enough to support the taller stock recorded on them. That scale supports a stock built to a median height of 5 stories, with 17% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors, a meaningful high-rise share layered onto larger ground than several of the walk-up-scale designations profiled elsewhere in this batch. Even with that added height, the designation is not dominated by towers — most of the recorded stock still tops out well below the tallest buildings found anywhere in this file, and the median figure describes typical construction rather than a handful of outliers.

Construction here leans prewar: the median year built is 1920, and 81% of recorded buildings predate 1940, against just 6% from the 1945-1975 boom and 9% built since 2000 — a fairly typical prewar-to-recent split for a designation this size. The recorded classes are led by walk-up apartment buildings at 37% and elevator apartment buildings at 28% — a heavier elevator-building share than several other designations in this batch, consistent with the larger lot sizes recorded above and the meaningful high-rise share noted there as well.

By land use, multi-family walk-up parcels account for 29% of lots, multi-family elevator use 23%, and mixed residential-and-commercial use 21%, a three-way split without one use dominating the footprint. That split, together with the elevator-building share noted above, points to a stock built for larger multi-family structures on assembled ground rather than the smaller rowhouse lots common to lower-numbered designations in this file. Residential use covers 83% of lots overall, and the tax-lot records count 177,495 homes across the roughly 4,900 lots carrying this designation — one of the larger housing totals among the districts profiled in this batch. Just 1% of these lots sit inside the mapped federal flood zone, among the lowest shares recorded here.

Room to build shows up on 90% of lots, with a median residual of 2.3 FAR — a broad recorded gap given the scale of the ground beneath it, and one of the wider recorded gaps among the designations covered in this batch. A recorded 12% of lots additionally sit inside designated historic districts, a moderate landmark overlay compared to the largest shares seen elsewhere in this file. The specific floor-area and height limits attached to any one of these lots, citations included, appear in the tables above, separate from the recorded stock summarized here.