Fordham Heights, The Bronx

Fordham Heights' file skews toward buildings whose recorded floor area falls short of what the district would allow: 84% of its roughly 680 tax lots carry that kind of headroom, and the median gap runs to 2.2 in residual FAR. That capacity sits under a neighborhood that was substantially built out before the modern zoning code existed — 82% of recorded buildings predate 1940, and the median construction year across the neighborhood is 1923. Only 3% of the stock dates from the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom, and just 7% has gone up since 2000, so the headroom on record reads less like new construction and more like older buildings that never used the full envelope their lots allow.

The building stock that does exist leans toward multifamily walk-ups: 35% of recorded building classes are walk-up apartment buildings, another 15% are two-family homes, and 14% are elevator buildings — a mix that tracks the land-use file, where 29% of lots are logged as multifamily walk-up use, 21% as one- and two-family use, and 14% as commercial-and-office use. Median lot size runs 4,750 square feet, with lots toward the top of the range reaching 13,283 square feet — room enough for the occasional deeper parcel among the smaller rowhouse-scale lots that dominate the median. Two-family homes and multifamily walk-ups have defined this stretch of the Bronx since long before contemporary zoning existed, and the assessment roll still carries that early build-out today.

The neighborhood's mapped zoning groups mostly into apartment-house districts, the kind of designation built for exactly the walk-up and elevator stock already on the roll, plus a narrow commercial corridor along its edge. Floors run to a median of 3, and only 4% of recorded buildings rise above 6 stories — a low-rise neighborhood by any building-permit measure. 74% of lots are logged as residential, holding 12,217 housing units across the neighborhood's file. Historic-district coverage stands at 0% here, and the mapped floodplain share is also 0% — both are statements about which regulatory boundary currently touches these lots, not a claim that the neighborhood has no age worth preserving or sits outside every flood risk.

Fordham Heights borders Belmont, Mount Hope, and the two University Heights sections to the north and south, part of a shared Bronx corridor where post-Depression walk-ups and rowhouses were the last major construction wave before the neighborhood settled into its current form. Per-lot records for each of these roughly 680 parcels — construction year, building class, residual capacity — are available individually rather than only as neighborhood aggregates.