Mapleton-Midwood (West), Brooklyn

Few parcel files divide as cleanly down the middle as Mapleton-Midwood (West). One-family homes sit on 38% of its roughly 5,100 tax lots and two-family houses on 35% — a near-even split between owning a whole building and sharing one, written into the block fronts themselves. Walk-up apartment buildings claim just 14% of lots, so the apartment house is present but never dominant. In land-use terms, 73% of lots carry one- or two-family buildings and 94% of all lots are residential, which makes this one of the more thoroughly house-built ledgers in this part of Brooklyn. Neither form clusters at one end of the district; the divide between one household and two runs through the middle of most blocks.

Age-wise the neighborhood belongs to the interwar years. 84% of recorded buildings predate 1940, the median construction year is 1930, and later eras barely dented the fabric: the boom between 1945 and 1975 accounts for 7% of buildings, and 5% date from 2000 or later. The median building stands 2 stories, and the share rising above 6 floors is 0% — no era of this neighborhood's construction ever reached for height, and nothing in the recent record suggests the pattern has broken. With 84% of the stock predating 1940, the neighborhood's present-day form was effectively fixed before the postwar decades reshaped so much of the borough around it, and the later entries in the ledger read as infill rather than transformation.

The remaining land use fills in around the houses. Multi-family walk-ups occupy 15% of lots and mixed residential-and-commercial parcels 5%, the latter tracing the shopping frontages. Lots are compact and consistent: the median parcel measures 2,525 square feet and the top decile reaches 4,820, dimensions that fit a house, a yard, and little else. Those parcels carry 14,038 recorded homes in total — a mid-sized count for southern Brooklyn, reached without a single tall building on the books, sustained instead by house-scale density repeated street after street.

Development capacity exists mostly on paper. 82% of lots record less floor area than their district allows, though the median residual is a moderate 0.5 FAR — an attic story's worth of allowance rather than a redevelopment site's. Neither major overlay complicates the picture: on the current federal maps, 0% of lots fall in a special flood hazard area (a fact about the mapped zone, not the weather), and no lots sit in designated historic districts. The neighborhood borders Bensonhurst, Borough Park, Midwood, and the Gravesend ledgers to the south.