M1-4/R7A Zoning District — New York City

The ground beneath this designation is unusually tight: a median lot of 4,170 square feet, with even the largest recorded parcels, at the 90th percentile, reaching only 19,163 square feet — the narrowest range of parcel sizes recorded for any designation in this batch. Across roughly 250 tax lots citywide, the buildings standing on that ground are older than most in this file: 73% predate 1940, and the median construction year is 1931. Only 7% of the recorded stock dates from the 1945-1975 postwar boom, and 14% has gone up since 2000, a modest but real trickle of recent construction onto ground this constrained, where assembling adjacent parcels for anything larger means combining several very small lots rather than working with one already-sizable one.

The recorded composition mixes housing and commerce on that tight ground: mixed residential-and-commercial parcels make up 18% of lots by land use, commercial-and-office use another 17%, and multi-family walk-up use 15%. Building classes lead with walk-up apartment buildings at 16% of the recorded stock, alongside two further classes each also at 16% and 11%. Overall, 40% of lots are coded residential, and the file counts 2,886 recorded homes across this designation's footprint — a meaningful residential base layered into a small-lot, mixed-use fabric where housing, offices, and street-level commerce sit on parcels barely a tenth of an acre apiece.

Height on lots this size stays modest: a median of 2.5 stories, with 11% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors. A recorded 4% of these lots also sit inside a designated historic district, a small but nonzero landmark overlay layered on top of the zoning here. Flood exposure is limited on the federal map: 5% of lots sit inside the mapped flood zone, a description of the regulatory boundary rather than a record of which specific lots have taken on water.

The development ledger shows broad but shallow recorded capacity: 87% of lots record floor area below their allowance, at a median gap of 2.8 FAR — breadth consistent with small, older parcels built out close to, but not all the way to, whatever their ground could carry. On lots this size, even a modest recorded gap can represent a real share of what could be added, though the specifics vary from lot to lot. The rules that actually govern any one of these roughly 250 lots — floor area, height, and everything else — are cited, with their sources, in the tables above.