Madison, Brooklyn

Madison's parcel file is single-minded. 96% of its roughly 5,900 tax lots are residential — about as close to a purely domestic ledger as the city's records produce — and 83% of lots hold one- or two-family buildings, the highest-concentration land-use line in this batch of southern Brooklyn files. The class mix repeats the message: one-family homes on 55% of lots, two-family houses on 29%, and walk-up apartment buildings on a marginal 5%. Commerce and industry are rounding errors here; the neighborhood is houses, streets, and little else, and the land-use categories that pad most Brooklyn files — offices, parking, industrial parcels — do not even appear among its leading lines.

It is also close to finished under its own rules. Only 59% of lots record any floor area below their zoning allowance — meaning a large minority of parcels show no recorded gap at all — and where headroom exists, the median residual is a slim 0.2 FAR. Neighborhoods elsewhere in the borough hold broad paper capacity; Madison's records read instead like a district that built what its rules allowed and stopped. The distinction is worth stating precisely: this is not a low-allowance neighborhood so much as a fully used one, where recorded floor area and permitted floor area have largely converged across the file.

The building stock behind those numbers is prewar and low. 77% of recorded buildings predate 1940, the median construction year is 1930, and later eras added little — 8% during the boom between 1945 and 1975 and just 2% since 2000. The median building stands 2 stories, with only 1% of the stock above 6 floors. Parcels run small and regular, a median of 2,310 square feet with the top decile at 4,000, and together they hold 17,350 recorded homes. Uniformity extends to height and parcel shape alike, which is why the neighborhood-wide medians describe individual Madison blocks unusually well; the averages are not smoothing over hidden variety.

What the file lacks is as telling as what it holds. On the current federal flood maps, 0% of Madison's lots fall inside a special flood hazard area — a boundary fact about the mapped zone, not a hydrological promise — and no lots sit in designated historic districts, so neither overlay adds a review layer here. Mixed residential-and-commercial parcels take 6% of lots and multi-family walk-ups 5%, tracing the few retail blocks. Madison borders Midwood, Flatlands, Marine Park-Mill Basin-Bergen Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and Gravesend (East)-Homecrest; per-lot detail for any address in the file is available through PearlAudit.