Bedford-Stuyvesant (West), Brooklyn

Scale is the first fact in this file. Bedford-Stuyvesant (West) spans roughly 7,500 tax lots — several times the size of the brownstone districts to its west — and those lots hold 39,337 recorded housing units, delivered almost entirely without height: the median building is 3 stories and only 2% of buildings exceed 6 floors. The grid is disciplined too, with a median lot of 2,000 square feet and a ninetieth percentile of just 4,011, one of the tighter lot-size spreads a rowhouse neighborhood can post. Nothing else in the surrounding files combines this much housing with this little variation in the container it comes in.

The stock is prewar at depth. 79% of buildings predate 1940 with a median year built of 1910; the boom years between 1945 and 1975 added just 3%, and 15% of the stock dates from 2000 or later — a recent layer that is easy to miss on a walk and plain in the records. Walk-up apartment buildings lead the class mix at 40%, two-family homes follow at 29%, and mixed residential-commercial buildings sit at 8%. Land use runs 43% multi-family walk-up and 33% one- and two-family parcels, with 89% of lots residential overall — housing, in nearly every direction the records look.

Then there is the headroom. 78% of lots carry recorded floor area below the district allowance, and the median residual is 0.6 FAR — both figures near the top of the surrounding files. For anyone comparing neighborhoods, the pairing worth noting is that breadth and depth arrive together: the gap is both common and, by rowhouse standards, substantial. Historic districts cover 14% of lots — meaningful protection, but far from a blanket — which leaves most of the paper capacity outside landmark review. Read together, the numbers describe a big, low, old, regular neighborhood whose zoning envelope was drawn looser than what the builders of 1910 chose to fill.

The federal flood map assigns 0% of lots to the special flood hazard area, an inland reading that speaks to regulatory boundaries and says nothing about stormwater or drainage, which no such map measures. Bedford-Stuyvesant (West) borders its eastern half along with Clinton Hill, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and South Williamsburg. All figures on this page aggregate the city's lot-by-lot property records; the parcel-level versions carry the specifics that an average across 7,500 lots necessarily blurs.