Three names, three different things
Oakwood turns up in the records under three names, and each points to something different. Oakwood Heights is the Staten Island Railway station. Oakwood Beach, in City Planning's 2017 East Shore report, is one of four waterfront communities on the Lower Bay, and it is also the name DEP gives to a watershed and a treatment plant. In city data, the official Oakwood-Richmondtown area, in Community District 3, contains both the station's census tract and the Oakwood Beach buyout land.
Oakwood Beach after Sandy
DCP reports that thousands of homes in Oakwood Beach, New Dorp Beach, Midland Beach and South Beach were severely damaged or destroyed in 2012, and it describes the Oakwood Beach buyout area as having suffered extreme coastal inundation. The State made Oakwood Beach an Enhanced Buyout Area after the storm. Owners were offered pre-storm value for house and land; under the program the houses would be demolished and the land returned to nature. Because the program was voluntary, some owners stayed.
The buyout land is now Special Coastal Risk District 3, shown on Map 4 of Zoning Resolution Article XIII, Chapter 7 (maps dated September 7, 2017). Inside that district, residential use is limited to single-family detached homes, and no ancillary dwelling unit may be added; accessory residential uses are still allowed. If a building there holding a non-conforming use loses half or more of its floor area after September 7, 2017, it may be rebuilt only for a conforming use. None of this applies to a lot just outside the line, so check the exact lot in ZoLa.
The watershed and the plant that share its name
DEP's Mid-Island Bluebelt plan describes the Oakwood Beach watershed as about 1,329 acres (Oakwood Beach watershed chapter, 2014). Its infrastructure section says the watershed "is largely sewered for sanitary service," though it notes stretches, mostly a block or two long, that still lacked sanitary sewers and relied on septic systems. The project description adds that the sanitary system is largely built and that individual septic systems would be decommissioned as sewers reach them.
Read that as the 2014 picture of a watershed. It does not establish whether a given house is connected, and it may have changed since. Request the sewer connection paperwork, locate the cleanout, and on a mid-century house budget for a camera run of the lateral, since clay and cast-iron lines of that age can crack or take in roots.
The plan's Bluebelt features aim to prevent inundation in areas along Kissam Avenue and to protect low-lying neighborhoods near the wetlands; about 61 acres of Bluebelt property lie south of Hylan Boulevard and north and east of the Oakwood Beach Wastewater Treatment Plant. DEP's plant list records that plant as operating since 1956, with a design capacity of 39.9 million gallons a day, discharging to Lower New York Bay and draining the southern section of Staten Island.
Oakwood Heights station and its tract
The MTA's station dataset lists Oakwood Heights as an open-cut station that is not accessible. Its tract, 132.01, holds about 553 homes (±57) in the Census Bureau's five-year estimates for 2020–2024. Just 42 (±22) went up before 1940; 450 date from the four decades to 1979 and 61 from 1980 onward (year built). Some 315 (±60) stand alone as single-unit houses, and 190 (±80) share a two-unit structure (units in structure). Of 547 occupied homes, 527 are owner-occupied, 96.3 percent (tenure).
That makes it an owner-occupied, largely mid-century tract. Houses of that period commonly still have an original or early service panel, older supply and drain piping, and a slab or crawlspace that deserves a moisture check in low spots.
What the tax-lot file shows for Oakwood-Richmondtown
The city's tax-lot file, PLUTO, reports these figures for the official Oakwood-Richmondtown area as a whole, not for Oakwood alone. The area has 5,818 lots and 8,482 homes. One-family houses account for 54.3 percent of units, two-family houses 26.8 percent, rental elevator buildings 12.0, walk-ups 5.2, condominiums 0.7, three-family houses 0.5 and mixed or unclassified lots 0.6. Units from before 1940 make up 5.3 percent, 1940 to 1979 73.9 percent, and 1980 on 20.7 percent. The median one- or two-family lot is 40.0 feet wide at the street.
Flood maps and the coastal project
On FEMA's effective map, about 1.4 percent of the official Oakwood-Richmondtown area is Zone VE and about 25 percent lies in A-zones, figures computed from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. The map is the 2007 edition, which the city's flood map site says still sets insurance while revised maps are pending. An area share says nothing about one house. Pull the address up in FEMA's online map search and price flood insurance before the contract.
The State Department of Environmental Conservation describes a federal coastal storm risk project running from the Verrazano Bridge to Oakwood Beach. The cost and schedule on that page date from the 2016 feasibility study, so ask the Army Corps of Engineers where the project stands now.
Permits and schedules
- Check the lot's zoning against the Lower Density Growth Management Area, which section 12-10 defines by district across Staten Island: the island's low-density residence districts from R1 through R3 along with R4A and R4-1, the C3A district, and its C1, C2 and C4 commercial districts.
- Community District 3's next gas piping window under DOB's Local Law 152 schedule runs through calendar 2028. One- and two-family homes are exempt.
- Local Law 126 of 2024, the basement and cellar legalization law, maps its program onto districts in other boroughs; DOB's April 2026 page still showed the rules as unfinished.
Scheduling
The walkthrough for an Oakwood house can be done in English or Bangla, from a base in East New York, Brooklyn, with the report sent the same day. What the visit includes is on the general home inspection page; for bookings, use contact.