Fifty-one homes taken off septic in the Jack's Pond project
A Department of Environmental Protection release dated 27 August 2021 reported that construction was finished on three Bluebelt projects on Staten Island's South Shore, one of them in Great Kills (DEP news release 21-030). There the city spent $46 million to improve drainage and rehabilitate Jack's Pond. Across a 50-acre watershed, crews built six stone-faced headwalls at Clovis Road, Hillside Terrace, Cleveland Avenue and La Fontaine Place, laid 6,464 linear feet of storm sewers with 74 catch basins, and installed 11,680 feet of ductile iron water main. Most telling for a buyer: 9,900 linear feet of new sanitary sewer allowed 51 homes to connect to the city system and stop using septic tanks.
Read that for what it establishes. By 2021 the city had laid sanitary sewer within the Jack's Pond project area, and until then 51 homes there used septic tanks. The release does not show that any particular house is connected, does not say the whole neighborhood is sewered, and is silent about houses outside the project area; it is also five years old. For any address here, request DEP's connection record, have the building sewer scoped by camera to the street, and, if a tank was taken out of service, ask for paperwork showing it was pumped and filled or removed.
The official Great Kills-Eltingville area in numbers
Great Kills shares its official neighborhood tabulation area with Eltingville, and this page carries the area's housing profile for both. The city's tax-lot file (PLUTO) counts 20,725 residential units on 15,539 residential lots across the official Great Kills-Eltingville area. One-family houses hold 55.7 percent of units and two-family houses 36.4 percent; condos come to 4.2 percent, and walk-ups, co-ops and everything else to under 4 percent combined. By era, 7.0 percent of units are from before 1940, 54.7 percent from 1940 through 1979 and 37.6 percent from 1980 on. Half of the area's one- and two-family lots have 40 feet of frontage or less.
Census figures for ZIP code area 10308, which extends beyond Great Kills, point the same way. Of 11,243 housing units, roughly 73 percent are one-unit homes, splitting into about 3,900 detached and about 4,300 attached, and 22.2 percent sit in two-unit buildings (table B25024). Owners occupy 79.8 percent of occupied units (B25003). About 8.5 percent of units were built before 1940 and 34.1 percent in 1980 or later (B25034), and 90.1 percent of occupied units heat with utility gas, with fuel oil a small share of roughly 3 percent (B25040).
Houses from the 1940-1979 stretch typically arrive with an electrical service sized for an earlier load, stretches of galvanized supply pipe, a clay or cast-iron sewer lateral, and sometimes a disused oil tank left behind after a switch to gas. Each is worth a specific question at the walkthrough.
Flood zones counted lot by lot
Testing each residential lot's center point against FEMA's flood hazard layer puts about 220 lots inside the Special Flood Hazard Area on blocks with a sale labeled Great Kills in the city's rolling sales file between September 2025 and August 2026, nearly all in Zone AE and two or three in Zone VE, plus 113 more in shaded Zone X, the 0.2-percent floodplain, itself a mapped hazard. Across the whole official area, roughly 370 to 380 residential lots fall in the Special Flood Hazard Area, a handful of them in coastal high-hazard Zone VE. Well over a hundred AE lots across the official area sit on blocks with no recent sale and so carry no label; every figure here is a floor, not a total.
Zone VE marks wave action as well as rising water, and new or substantially improved construction there has to meet stricter elevation and foundation standards. FEMA made the city's current map effective on 5 September 2007, and its Community Status Book lists no Community Rating System discount for New York City. Pull the individual lot at the Flood Map Service Center, and order an elevation certificate and a policy quote before the contract is signed.
Zoning that reaches the back yard
PLUTO shows the Special South Richmond Development District on all but one residential lot in the official area. The rules were revised in November 2023 (Mayor's Office announcement); since then, removing trees of six-inch caliper or more, regrading or changing drainage on a house lot falls under the district's natural-feature and tree rules and has to be shown on the Department of Buildings filing with a survey map, while lots of an acre or more face additional review (Zoning Resolution Article X, Chapter 7). A pool, an extension or new grading should be budgeted with a survey of trees and topography.
Separately, ZR 12-10 puts a Staten Island lot in the lower density growth management area when it is zoned R1 through R3, R4A, R4-1, C3A, C1, C2 or C4, so the lot's own zoning district decides whether those provisions apply. Gas piping in buildings outside the one- and two-family exemption comes due under Local Law 152 in Community District 3's next window, calendar 2028.
The Great Kills station
Great Kills station, S19 on the Staten Island Railway, is built in an open cut and is flagged as ADA-accessible in both directions in the state's station dataset; that is the dataset's entry, not a site check. The line runs north to St. George and the ferry.
Bay Terrace
Bay Terrace is on the city's Community Board 3 roster. Its Staten Island Railway station, S20, stands on an embankment and is not flagged as accessible in the state dataset. Between September 2025 and August 2026 the sales file used a combined "Great Kills-Bay Terrace" label for 54 sales, 29 of them inside the official Great Kills-Eltingville area and 25 in the official Oakwood-Richmondtown area. In December 2020 the city reported completing a storm sewer upgrade in Bay Terrace, aimed at severe street flooding at the Amboy Road overpass.
Setting a date
The south shore is a drive from the East New York base, so dates are arranged ahead through the contact form. A full walkthrough of a Great Kills house can run in English or Bangla, and its report is delivered the same day; a two-family house is covered under the multi-unit service.