A neighborhood the City documents jointly
There is no stand-alone City Planning study for Hollis; the file for one returns a 404. Everything the City says about zoning here sits inside a joint action for St. Albans and Hollis that the City Council adopted on October 29, 2007, covering "all or portions of 317 blocks in the southeastern Queens neighborhoods of St. Albans and Hollis, Community District 12, Queens," generally bounded by Merrick, Springfield and Francis Lewis Boulevards and, to the north, 99th Avenue, Farmers Boulevard and Brinkerhoff Avenue. Anything Hollis-specific has to be read off the street names inside it. Hollis Avenue is the local commercial spine, photographed at 200th Street, with further frontage on Linden Boulevard, Farmers Boulevard and Murdock Avenue.
A fifth of the units are in apartment buildings
In ZIP Code Tabulation Area 11423, which probably reaches into Holliswood, the 2020-2024 American Community Survey counts 10,201 units: about 12.9 percent in buildings of 50 apartments or more and 9.3 percent in buildings of 20 to 49, alongside 40.2 percent detached one-family, 9.1 percent attached, 20.3 percent two-unit and 6.4 percent three- or four-unit (table B25024). Owner-occupancy runs near 55.7 percent (B25003). On age, 35.6 percent predates 1940 and 90.3 percent predates 1980 (B25034); utility gas heats 84.2 percent of occupied units and fuel oil 6.9 percent (B25040).
So a purchase here may well be a co-op or condo unit, which changes what a walkthrough can settle. The systems inside the apartment are examined the ordinary way; the shared ones are a question about the building's money. Board minutes, reserve figures and public filings are where a future assessment shows itself first: the facade cycle under Local Law 11, which requires exterior wall inspections every five years for buildings higher than six stories, though how many here clear that height was not established; the building's standing under Local Law 97, which is a matter of public record; and Local Law 152, whose sub-cycle D puts Community District 12's gas piping inspections between January 1 and December 31, 2027, one- and two-family homes excepted.
Attached houses with parking in the rear
That 2007 action put R4B over 36 blocks including the area "West of Francis Lewis Boulevard between Hollis Avenue and 116th Avenue," described as "predominantly built with attached, one- and two-family residences that have parking in the rear." An attached house shares more than a wall: the party walls, the continuous roof plane over the row and the rear yard drainage are held jointly with its neighbors, and a defect on the far side tends to become the buyer's problem. Elsewhere R3A went over portions of 190 blocks including the area bounded by "Hollis Avenue, 198th Street, 99th Avenue and Francis Lewis Boulevard."
What the old districts allowed
One provision in the 1961 map explains much of what stands here. In R6B, "one parking space is required for every two dwelling units but can be waived if five or fewer spaces are required," and City Planning captions "Buildings utilizing the parking waiver on Farmers Boulevard in an R6B district" as what it wanted stopped. It does not make a building defective; it explains a small apartment house on a block of homes.
Twenty blocks rebuilt, and the ponding behind them
In August 2019 the Department of Design and Construction published a story on a $24 million project in Hollis and Queens Village: "2,030 feet of new storm sewers, 6,863 feet of new sanitary sewers to 20 blocks of rebuilt streets." The work was "scheduled to be completed by mid-2021." That date is a schedule, not a record: whether the work finished, and which blocks it covered, are not stated. And the problem is described in the present tense as of 2019 - outside one store, "stormwater ponds in the street for days after the last rainstorm and prevents people from using the pedestrian ramp in front of the store to cross the street." A Hollis homeowner quoted in the same story described what she found when she moved in: "the roads seemed to be leaning and the driveways corresponded with the lean on the road." A July 2024 release sets that job inside a $2.64 billion southeast Queens program of "46 projects overall, including 24 that are already completed."
Minimal flood hazard, real groundwater
An area-wide reading of FEMA's effective flood mapping, not a lot-level lookup, returns a single polygon: unshaded Zone X, an area of minimal flood hazard, with no mapped special flood hazard area in it at all. Separately, the Department of Environmental Protection told a City Council committee on May 7, 2025 that "many areas with separate sewers in the city, like Southeast Queens, have high groundwater tables." A house can sit outside every FEMA flood zone and still take water up through a cellar floor, which is why the floor, its perimeter, the sump and the discharge line matter here, along with the sewer lateral - on a street with a rebuilt main, often the oldest link left in the chain. Run the address through the City's flood maps and FEMA's Map Service Center first.
A station with stairs only
The Long Island Rail Road lists Hollis on the Hempstead Branch in fare zone 3 and records its accessibility as none, which matters to a buyer with mobility in mind; City Planning places the station "on Linden Boulevard near Farmers Boulevard." The MTA station dataset shows no subway stop inside the neighborhood, the nearest being Jamaica-179 St on the F line. The temporary residence program in Local Law 126 of 2024 is written for a list of community districts whose only Queens entry is the second, so a cellar apartment here has no route to legalization, and no historic district on the Landmarks Preservation Commission's Queens list falls in Hollis. Individual landmarks were not checked.
A visit begins in East New York and can run in English or in Bangla, with the written report out that day. For a house, see general home inspections; for a two- or three-family, multi-family home inspection. Send an address through contact.