Mount Hope, The Bronx

Mount Hope's building stock is prewar nearly wall to wall: 81% of buildings predate 1940, and the median build year is 1920 — figures that make this one of the oldest files in the west Bronx records. The boom decades between 1945 and 1975 added just 3%, and construction since 2000 accounts for 12% — enough to register, not enough to move the neighborhood's essential date stamp. Whatever else the file says, it says this first: these blocks were substantially built out before zoning as New York now practices it existed, and most of what follows flows from that.

What the early builders left is apartment fabric with real height in its tail. Walk-up apartment buildings lead the class ledger at 33%, but elevator apartment buildings take 17% — a strong showing for this scale of neighborhood — and 9% of all buildings rise past 6 floors, against a median of 3 stories. By land use, multi-family walk-ups cover 29% of the roughly 1,100 tax lots, one- and two-family buildings 22%, and multi-family elevator buildings 13%. Three-quarters of lots — 75% — are residential, and they carry 21,361 housing units.

For a neighborhood this built-up, the zoning ledger shows a striking amount of unused allowance: 88% of lots record floor area below what their districts permit, with a median residual floor-area ratio of 2.5 — the kind of margin that appears when prewar fabric sits under rules drawn generously, decades after the buildings went up. The number measures paper capacity lot by lot; it is not a forecast, and this page does not treat it as one. Which specific parcels hold the slack is a per-lot question, and the answers vary widely.

A designated historic district covers 3% of lots — a small but real preservation layer on particular blocks. Flood mapping, by contrast, records nothing: 0% of lots fall inside the federally mapped floodplain, which describes the current federal maps and makes no promises about water. Lots run to a median of 3,585 square feet, with one in ten at 13,800 or more. The surrounding files — Belmont, Claremont Village-Claremont (East), Fordham Heights, Mount Eden-Claremont (West), Tremont, and University Heights (South)-Morris Heights — share pieces of this profile, though each combines them differently. Per-lot records for the roughly 1,100 parcels are on PearlAudit.