NYC Housing Stock: Homes, Walk-Ups and Elevator Buildings

Most of NYC's homes are in apartment buildings, but most of its residential lots hold small houses. Of the 3,736,645 residential units in the city's tax lot data, 38% are in elevator apartment buildings and 25% in walk-ups. One- and two-family houses hold 22% of units, yet they make up 74% of all residential lots.

How we counted

We used PLUTO, the Department of City Planning's file of every tax lot in the city, version 26v2. Of its 858,284 lots, 767,563 have at least one residential unit. We grouped those lots by borough and building class, then by the first letter of the class, which the Department of Finance uses for the broad building type: A for one-family dwellings, B for two-family, C for walk-up apartments, D for elevator apartments, R for condominiums and S for buildings that are primarily residential with a store or office. Everything else, such as office or store buildings with a few apartments, is "other."

Two things to know before reading the charts. Co-ops are not their own letter: they sit inside C (walk-up co-ops) and D (elevator co-ops). And a condo building appears as one billing lot with all its units, under an R class.

Each borough has a different shape

Manhattan: elevator buildings

54% of Manhattan's 958,956 units are in elevator apartment buildings, and another 19% in condos. One- and two-family houses are rare: 6,070 units, under 1% of the borough.

Brooklyn: the most units and the most walk-ups

Brooklyn has the most residential units of any borough, 1,115,989. It also has the most walk-up units of any borough (349,871) and 189,420 units in two-family houses, second only to Queens (192,603). Its elevator and walk-up stock are close in size: 346,034 elevator units against 349,871 in walk-ups.

Queens: houses on most lots, apartments for most units

Queens has 150,637 one-family lots, more than any other borough, and one- and two-family houses hold 39% of its units. Elevator buildings are still its largest single type, with 249,117 units.

The Bronx: elevator buildings lead

In the Bronx, 49% of units are in elevator buildings and 29% in walk-ups. Houses account for 14%.

Staten Island: a borough of houses

On Staten Island, 77% of the 180,241 units are in one- or two-family houses. Elevator buildings hold only 13,585 units on 83 lots.

Counted by lots instead of units, the picture flips. One-family lots (312,720) and two-family lots (253,693) dominate, while the 15,596 elevator building lots, about 2% of residential lots, hold 1,416,432 units, an average of about 91 units per lot.

The single largest class is D4, elevator co-ops, with 385,398 units on 3,539 lots. Next are D1 elevator apartments (355,793) and C1 walk-ups with more than six families and no stores (302,142). RM, a class the Department of City Planning assigns to condo buildings whose units mix residential and commercial types, holds 286,488 units, the largest condo class.

The full table

What this means when you search

Building type shapes the search. In Manhattan and the Bronx, elevator buildings hold the largest share of units (54% and 49%). In Brooklyn and Queens, houses and walk-ups together hold more units than elevator buildings, and on Staten Island houses dominate. If you are buying, a D4 or C6 class means a co-op, while an R class means a condo; see co-op vs condo. Every building page on Roofy shows the lot's building class: search an address on the NYC building lookup and decode it with NYC building class codes.

Limits of this data

For when this housing was built, see how old NYC's buildings are, and to understand the source file, read PLUTO data fields explained.