University Heights (South)-Morris Heights, The Bronx

Two-family homes lead the class ledger in University Heights (South) and Morris Heights — 36% of recorded building classes, ahead of walk-up apartment buildings at 27% and elevator buildings at 12%. Yet the same file counts 26,800 housing units, the heaviest total in its immediate ring. The records resolve the apparent contradiction simply: the lot count is dominated by small homes while the unit count is dominated by the apartment houses among them — two neighborhoods sharing one ledger. Neither half should be read without the other, because most questions worth asking here are answered differently for a rowhouse file than for a multifamily one.

By land use, one- and two-family buildings cover 43% of lots, multi-family walk-ups 25%, and multi-family elevator buildings 10%, with 84% of lots in residential use. The fabric holds to a median of 3 stories, and only 3% of buildings rise past 6 floors — the height statistics of a house neighborhood carrying the unit count of an apartment one. Lots come in at a median of 3,000 square feet, with one in ten reaching 13,000 or more.

The stock is firmly prewar: 65% of buildings predate 1940, the median build year is 1925, and the boom decades between 1945 and 1975 account for only 3%. Construction since 2000 adds 11% — steady renewal rather than wholesale replacement. On the development side, 78% of lots carry recorded floor area below their district allowance, with a median residual floor-area ratio of 1.5; that is a fact about allowances on paper, and it distributes unevenly between the small-home lots and the apartment parcels.

Flood mapping brushes the neighborhood without covering it: 1% of lots sit inside the federally mapped floodplain — close to zero but not zero, and best resolved parcel by parcel along the low ground near the Harlem River. No designated historic district appears in the record, at 0% of lots. The adjoining files are Fordham Heights, Highbridge, Mount Eden-Claremont (West), Mount Hope, and University Heights (North)-Fordham; against all of them, this one is distinguished less by any single figure than by the split character its class ledger and unit count describe together.