Parkchester, The Bronx

Parkchester's tax-lot file is compact by the standards of this cluster of neighborhoods — just 380 recorded parcels — but those lots carry 14,523 housing units, a unit-to-lot ratio unmatched among the neighborhoods profiled here. The file describes a small number of large, heavily built parcels rather than a broad field of individual house lots, and the lot-size numbers confirm it: a median lot of 2,617 square feet sits well below the top of the file, where one lot in ten reaches 13,125 square feet or more — meaning a handful of much larger parcels pull the upper end of the file far past the typical size. Few other neighborhoods in this batch show that kind of spread, and that concentration also means the neighborhood-wide averages on this page describe a small number of large sites more than any broad cross-section of typical lots. Residential use covers 73% of lots overall, leaving a substantial remainder given over to the commercial and institutional uses described below.

Development headroom on those lots is the widest recorded in this stretch of the Bronx: 90% of parcels hold less floor area than their district currently allows, with a median residual of 1.3 additional FAR still unbuilt on record. That is a notably high figure set against a neighborhood already carrying this much recorded density, and it says nothing about what happens to that unused capacity — only that the tax-lot file shows it sitting there, lot by lot, waiting to be checked individually rather than assumed.

Land-use records list 33% of lots as one- and two-family home sites, 25% as multi-family walk-up, and 12% as commercial and office use — the highest commercial share among the neighborhoods covered in this cluster. Construction dates mostly earlier: the median building went up in 1930, 70% of the stock predates 1940, just 11% dates from the postwar boom between 1945 and 1975, and 10% has been built since 2000. No lots are recorded inside a historic district, so the age profile carries no preservation designation on file, and the three era shares together account for the great majority of the recorded stock.

None of Parkchester's tax lots are recorded inside a mapped flood zone — a 0% share — and only 1% of buildings exceed 6 floors, with a median height of 2 stories, so the density here reads through unit counts rather than tower height. The neighborhood borders Castle Hill-Unionport, Morris Park, Pelham Parkway-Van Nest, Soundview-Bruckner-Bronx River, and Westchester Square, each with its own per-lot file on these pages down to the individual parcel. None of those neighboring files carry anywhere near Parkchester's unit-per-lot density, which is part of what makes this one worth reading against its neighbors rather than in isolation.