Arden Heights-Rossville: a stock mostly built since 1980
Arden Heights gives its name to the official Arden Heights-Rossville neighborhood tabulation area, and this page carries that area's housing profile. The city's tax-lot file (PLUTO) records 11,081 residential units on 8,184 residential lots across the official Arden Heights-Rossville area. One-family houses make up 56.8 percent of units, two-family houses 33.3 percent and condominiums 9.5 percent. Construction is recent by city standards: 72.6 percent of units date from 1980 or later, 21.4 percent from 1940 through 1979 and 0.6 percent from before 1940. Among one- and two-family lots, the midpoint width is 25 feet.
The city's rolling sales file labels 3,874 residential lots as Arden Heights, and all 236 sales under that name between September 2025 and August 2026 were inside the official area and in ZIP code 10312. Arden Heights also appears on the city's Community Board 3 list.
ZIP code area 10312 in the census
ZIP code area 10312 takes in Eltingville and other places besides Arden Heights, so treat it as the wider picture. The Census Bureau counts 22,697 homes there. Single-unit structures make up roughly three in four, 76.5 percent: about 9,700 stand alone and about 7,600 share a wall. Two-unit buildings account for another 21.5 percent (ACS 2020-2024, B25024). More than half, 54.7 percent, went up in 1980 or later, against 5.0 percent before 1940 (B25034). Owner households fill 82.5 percent of the occupied homes (B25003); utility gas warms 91.1 percent of them, and oil is a sliver near 2 percent (B25040).
What attached houses of the 1980s and 1990s usually need looked at
- Fire separation in the party wall, including the attic, where the barrier between units should run up to the roof deck.
- The roof tie-in where one owner's shingles meet the neighbor's, and any step flashing along a change in height.
- Shared drainage: leaders and swales that carry one yard's water across another's.
- Window and door flashing behind vinyl siding, which ages out of sight.
- Deck ledgers fastened to the rim joist, and grading that has settled toward the foundation.
- Furnaces, air conditioners and water heaters: where they are original, they may be at or past a typical service life.
Sewer records: nothing place-specific
No primary source found for this page describes sewer construction or septic use in Arden Heights. The Department of Environmental Protection's Bluebelt page covers fifteen watersheds at the island's southern end and the Richmond Creek watershed without naming Arden Heights. Do not assume a connection; the way to know is DEP's connection record for the address and a camera run of the line to the street, arranged before the contract goes firm.
Flood mapping, stated positively
Sixty-five residential lots on Arden Heights-labelled blocks have their middle point inside shaded Zone X (National Flood Hazard Layer). That shading marks FEMA's 0.2-percent-annual-chance floodplain, a mapped hazard area and not a clean bill. For the whole official area the tally is 75. Both tallies undercount by design, since a lot can straddle a zone line its middle point misses and blocks with no recent sale are never labelled. FEMA's map for the city took effect on 5 September 2007; the city's line in the Community Status Book shows no Community Rating System class, meaning no premium reduction from that program. Enter the address at the Flood Map Service Center for the lot's own designation.
Zoning a renovator will meet
All but three residential lots in the official area carry the Special South Richmond Development District in PLUTO. The City Council adopted revisions to it in November 2023 (Mayor's Office release). Under the amended chapter a "site alteration" covers felling trees of six-inch caliper or more, permanent changes to the lie of the land and changes to drainage, and a DOB application for one needs a survey map plus a site plan marking which trees go and which stay; any zoning lot of one acre or more is a "plan review site" (ZR Chapter 107). A lot zoned R1, R2, R3, R4A, R4-1 or C3A, or C1, C2 or C4, also falls in a lower density growth management area as ZR 12-10 defines one for Staten Island.
Community District 3's next gas-piping window is calendar 2028. One- and two-family houses are exempt, but the exemption stops at the R-3 class, so a three-family house or a larger condominium building is covered. The Local Law 126 basement-apartment program covers no Staten Island district and remains a proposed rule as of September 2026.
Transit
The Staten Island Railway has no stop bearing the Arden Heights name, so look up the address on the MTA's own trip planner before counting on any route to the St. George ferry.
Rossville
Rossville is also on the Community Board 3 roster, and 134 of the 137 sales the city file labeled Rossville between September 2025 and August 2026 were recorded in ZIP code 10309. Census figures for ZIP code area 10309, which reaches beyond Rossville, show 12,921 housing units, 76.2 percent built in 1980 or later (B25034), 67.2 percent one-unit and 28.6 percent two-unit (B25024), and 76.3 percent of occupied units owner-occupied (B25003). On blocks with a sale labeled Rossville in that same period, five residential lots have their center point in FEMA's shaded Zone X floodplain.
City Planning's 2001 About Fresh Kills document says Rossville grew up in the early nineteenth century around the old Blazing Star Ferry, one of the crossings between New York and Philadelphia. The railroad from Clifton to Tottenville bypassed it in 1860, and the document dates the town's decline from then until the West Shore Expressway was completed in 1970.
Arranging the visit
Newer houses still hide problems behind finished walls. To look at one here, send the address and preferred day via the booking form; there is a one-family option and a two-family option, either spoken in English or Bangla, with the written report issued the same day as the visit.