Pelham Parkway-Van Nest, The Bronx

Pelham Parkway-Van Nest's median building dates to 1925, the earliest median construction year recorded among the neighborhoods in this file. That age shows up across the record: 70% of the recorded stock predates 1940, tied for the highest prewar share in this batch, while the postwar boom between 1945 and 1975 added a further 20%. Just 7% of buildings have gone up since 2000, and no lots are recorded inside a historic district, so the age profile here reflects construction timing alone rather than any preservation status. Among the neighborhoods covered in this file, only one other shares this same tied-highest prewar share, and neither carries a historic-district designation to go with it — old construction here is a matter of record, not of protected status.

Lots here run tighter than anywhere else covered in this file: the median lot is 2,375 square feet, the smallest median recorded in this batch, and even the top of the file stays close, reaching 6,162 square feet at most. That tight parcel pattern sits alongside a fairly standard building-class mix — two-family homes make up 42% of structures, walk-up apartment buildings 25%, and one-family homes 9%. The lot geometry and the class ledger together describe a neighborhood of small, regular parcels rather than one shaped by a handful of outsized sites, unlike some of the larger-lot files elsewhere in this batch.

Land-use records list 51% of lots as one- and two-family home sites and 24% as multi-family walk-up, with mixed residential-commercial use covering a further 7%. Residential use overall covers 86% of the neighborhood's roughly 2,100 tax lots, which carry 12,356 housing units in total. The median building height is 2 stories, and none are recorded above 6 floors, keeping the built form as compact as the lots underneath it — height and lot size telling the same story from two different columns of the file. Neither figure suggests any hidden capacity for the kind of taller building found in a few of the neighboring files.

Development headroom covers 78% of lots, with a median residual of 0.5 additional FAR still unbuilt on record. No lots are recorded inside a mapped flood zone — a 0% share on the current federal map. Pelham Parkway-Van Nest borders Allerton, Morris Park, Parkchester, Soundview-Bruckner-Bronx River, West Farms, and Westchester Square, each covered on these pages with the same per-lot detail — a wide ring of neighbors against which this file's older median year and tighter lots stand out clearly.