Melrose, The Bronx

A median build year of 1989 would normally describe a postwar neighborhood; in Melrose it describes a gap. Only 3% of the buildings on record went up during the boom decades between 1945 and 1975, so the age profile splits into two separated generations. Nearly half the stock — 46% — predates 1940, the tenement and rowhouse fabric of the early Bronx, while another 28% has been built since 2000. The median lands where it does not because much was built around 1989, but because the distribution has almost nothing in its middle. The city's tax-lot records rarely draw the arc of clearance and rebuilding this plainly, and every other figure on this page should be read with that split in mind.

The blocks themselves mix small homes with apartment houses in nearly equal measure. One- and two-family buildings occupy 30% of lots and multi-family walk-ups another 29%, with mixed residential-commercial buildings — the storefront-plus-apartments type — on a further 14%. In the building-class ledger, walk-up apartment buildings lead at 33%, ahead of one-family homes at 16% and two-family homes at 14%. Heights stay low: the median building is 3 stories, and just 4% of buildings on record rise past 6 floors. Lots run compact at a median of 2,500 square feet, though one lot in ten measures 10,000 square feet or more.

Zoning leaves visible slack. Some 82% of Melrose lots carry recorded floor area below what their districts allow, and the median gap is 1.6 in floor-area ratio — a meaningful margin in the apartment-house districts that govern most of the neighborhood. Two cautions apply. First, the figure describes allowances on paper, not intentions: the records log capacity, never plans. Second, headroom is a lot-level fact, and a neighborhood-wide share says nothing about whether any particular parcel carries slack — that is a question the per-lot file answers, not the summary.

Two zeros in the file deserve exact reading. The share of lots inside the federally mapped floodplain is 0% — a fact about FEMA's current maps, not a promise about water — and 0% of lots sit within a designated historic district, so preservation review appears nowhere as a recorded constraint. With 76% of lots residential and 19,481 housing units logged, Melrose remains a living quarter rather than a district of institutions. Its file reads alongside those of Mott Haven-Port Morris, Longwood, Morrisania, and Concourse-Concourse Village, and per-lot detail for each of the roughly 1,600 parcels — year built, floor area, remaining allowance — is available on PearlAudit.