Norwood, The Bronx

Norwood's file describes a neighborhood built up early and largely left alone since: 84% of recorded buildings predate 1940, the median construction year is 1925, and only 6% of the stock has gone up since 2000. The 1945-to-1975 postwar boom accounts for 7% of buildings, a modest addition layered onto a neighborhood that was already substantially built by the time that construction wave arrived. That leaves relatively little of the neighborhood's built history unaccounted for by the two dominant eras the file tracks.

Building classes split 28% walk-up apartments, 26% two-family homes, and 14% elevator buildings, tracking a land-use file where 33% of lots are logged for one- and two-family use, 26% for multifamily walk-up use, and 10% for multifamily elevator use. Median lot size runs 3,500 square feet, with the largest recorded lots reaching all the way to 15,000 square feet, a considerably wider range than the median alone implies. That spread of parcel sizes matters for anyone reading the median in isolation, since it understates how much variation actually exists lot to lot.

Recorded development capacity here reads more modest: 69% of lots carry floor area below their district allowance, with a median residual FAR of 0.7. Floors run to a median of 2.5 stories, and just 3% of recorded buildings rise above 6 stories. 79% of lots are logged as residential, carrying 16,885 housing units. Historic-district coverage and mapped floodplain share both stand at 0% for Norwood's lots — statements about the current regulatory map, not about the neighborhood's age or its distance from water.

Norwood's mapped zoning groups into apartment-house districts, several of them contextual designations, bordering Bedford Park, Belmont, Kingsbridge Heights-Van Cortlandt Village, and Williamsbridge-Olinville. That web of adjacencies places Norwood at the northern edge of the connected Bronx neighborhoods carried in this same file. Per-lot construction-year, building-class, and capacity detail are available individually for each of these roughly 1,100 parcels rather than only as this neighborhood-wide summary.

A median residual FAR of 0.7 and a headroom share of 69% describe lots that are, on the whole, closer to their recorded built limit than not — a plain reading of the capacity numbers rather than any judgment about whether further building is likely on any particular lot. Norwood's median height of 2.5 stories, a fractional figure produced by averaging a genuinely mixed set of one-, two-, and three-story buildings, is itself a small window into that same built-out character.