Bensonhurst, Brooklyn

Bensonhurst's tax-lot records cover roughly 11,000 lots, the largest count among the neighborhoods profiled in this set, and those lots carry 37,329 housing units between them. 96% are recorded as residential, one of the higher residential shares in this batch. Scale shows up in the land-use figures too: 57% one- and two-family use, 29% multi-family walk-up, and 9% mixed residential and commercial, a mix broad enough to include real variety block to block, from single-family rows to larger walk-up buildings sharing the same corridor. That scale advantage shows up across nearly every measure in its record, from raw lot count to total recorded housing.

The construction record runs old: 85% of buildings predate 1940, with a median construction year of 1930. The postwar boom between 1945 and 1975 accounts for 8% of the stock, and just 2% has been built since 2000. None of the neighborhood's lots are recorded inside a designated historic district, leaving its character resting on zoning and ownership patterns rather than landmark rules. That construction profile, old, consistent, and largely unbroken by any later building boom of note, matches the pattern found in several of its immediate neighbors along this stretch of southern Brooklyn.

By building class, two-family homes make up 43% of the stock, walk-up apartment buildings 29%, and one-family homes 14%. Bensonhurst's lots carry headroom too: 76% sit below their district's floor-area limit, at a median residual of 0.4 FAR. Height stays low across the neighborhood, a median of 2 stories, with none recorded above six floors. Lot sizes run a median of 2,467 square feet, with the largest recorded parcels reaching 4,000 square feet. That combination of two-family dominance and shallow but widespread headroom describes a neighborhood built to a fairly uniform template, lot after lot.

None of the recorded lots sit inside a federally designated flood zone, a fact about where regulators currently draw the hazard boundary rather than a claim about flood history. The neighborhood borders Bath Beach, Borough Park, Dyker Heights, Gravesend's western section, and the western part of Mapleton-Midwood, each carrying its own parcel-level record elsewhere in this set, with its own construction era and its own headroom figures. Its five bordering neighborhoods span from the harborfront near Bath Beach to the denser blocks toward Borough Park, a wide enough radius to touch several of the other construction profiles gathered in this batch, from postwar-heavy sections to overwhelmingly prewar ones.