Bedford Park, The Bronx

Bedford Park's file logs 24,348 housing units across the 86% of its roughly 1,300 tax lots recorded as residential. That density sits on a building stock that's 82% prewar, with a median construction year of 1922 and just 5% of the stock dating from the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom. Only 10% of recorded buildings have gone up since 2000, so most of that unit count traces back to construction that predates the current zoning code entirely. That combination of scale and age describes a neighborhood built up densely well before elevator apartment buildings became typical citywide, yet still carrying a meaningful elevator-building share today.

Building classes run 31% walk-up apartments, 19% two-family homes, and 19% elevator buildings — a near-even split between the two multifamily forms once two-family homes are set aside. The land-use file logs a similar pattern: 31% of lots for one- and two-family use, 28% for multifamily walk-up use, and 15% for multifamily elevator use. Median lot size runs 3,331 square feet, with the largest recorded lots reaching up to 13,810 square feet, giving the neighborhood a somewhat wider lot-size spread than its median alone would suggest.

Development capacity is meaningfully present too: 78% of lots carry recorded floor area below their district allowance, with a median residual FAR of 1.1. Floors run to a median of 3, and 6% of recorded buildings rise above 6 stories — a somewhat taller share than a purely low-rise file would produce. A recorded historic-district designation covers 1% of Bedford Park's lots, while the mapped floodplain share stands at 0% — both regulatory-map statements rather than judgments about the neighborhood's character or water exposure.

Bedford Park's mapped zoning runs mostly to apartment-house districts, several of them contextual designations that cap building form more tightly than a standard apartment-house district would. The neighborhood borders Belmont, Kingsbridge Heights-Van Cortlandt Village, Norwood, and University Heights (North)-Fordham. That geography places Bedford Park at the center of several connected residential blocks rather than at an edge. Per-lot construction-year, building-class, and capacity records are available individually for each of these roughly 1,300 parcels.

Reading the historic-district and headroom figures together is instructive: a neighborhood can carry preservation status on a small share of its lots while still showing substantial recorded capacity on the rest, since the two measures track entirely different things — architectural or streetscape designation on one hand, unused zoning allowance on the other. Bedford Park's file shows both can be true on the same set of blocks.