New York City’s Most Serious Housing Violations Stay Open for Months or Even Years

Their fight against heat and hot water outages, rodent infestations, leaky pipes, and collapsed bathroom ceilings has stretched back more than a decade. The city’s legal win took nearly four years.

The mayor, whose election was fueled by renters, has promised to “freeze the rent” and go after bad landlords. Yet clearing all of the existing dangerous housing code violations and holding landlords accountable poses a major challenge for the city’s housing department.

The number of health-threatening housing code violations in New York City sharply increased in recent years, and a significant number of them are going unrepaired, according to a New York Focus analysis of city inspection data from January 2016 through the end of May 2026. 

Known as Class C violations, they include lack of heat or hot water, lead paint hazards, and leaks deemed “immediately hazardous” to tenants. There were 278,000 such violations in 2025, down slightly from 2024, but more than double the number in 2018.

These violations are verified by HPD and require landlords to make repairs promptly — within 24 hours or 21 days, depending on the violation — but that usually doesn’t happen. More than 70 percent of the more than 450,000 active Class C violations in privately owned buildings have been outstanding for over a year. As of the end of May 2026, 26 percent of the violations issued in 2024 and 34 percent of those from 2025 remained unresolved.

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD, is the city’s primary housing code enforcement agency. The agency has several enforcement tools at its disposal, including the ability to impose civil penalties, initiate emergency repairs and bill landlords for them, or even strip landlords of their management rights over buildings.

Tenant advocates and attorneys say the enforcement of these laws sometimes falls short. The enormity of the task was exposed this winter, when HPD claimed to have resolved 99 percent of heat and hot water problems, only to later admit that many were closed without an inspection. 

In response to New York Focus’s findings, Natasha Kersey, a spokesperson for HPD, said the agency has ramped up inspections, collected tens of millions of dollars in civil penalties since 2022, and closed hundreds of thousands of violations through lawsuits it has initiated. Between April 2016 and April 2026, the agency said, it issued 1.8 million Class C violations and closed 1.4 million.

“The agency refuses to stand by while bad actors ignore their responsibilities,” she said. “The message is clear: Neglect is not acceptable, and landlords must make necessary repairs or face the consequences.”

In May, the Mamdani administration released its first major housing plan, which includes measures to improve how the city responds to violations and tenant complaints.

For example, starting in October, HPD will no longer bundle reports of no heat or hot water across multiple units in a building. Under this practice, the agency currently closes multiple complaints after resolving just one tenant’s case. The housing blueprint also includes a new online system, launching this fall, for renters to more easily reschedule inspections if they’re not home when an HPD inspector stops by.

In addition to addressing tenants’ issues, the plan details more aggressive enforcement against negligent landlords, including “an expedited litigation process” in housing court for building-wide Class C violations.

“We didn’t get heat or hot water most of the time. I had to use my oven for heat. It was just unbearable,” recalled Carrie Maldonado, who lived at the time in a two-bedroom unit on the first floor. In 2022, Maldonado finally decided to move out of her rent-stabilized apartment, where she had lived since 1988.

Two months after Mamdani’s press conference, Miller has yet to correct all the outstanding violations or pay the judgment fine, a spokesperson for the Law Department told New York Focus. Instead, court filings show he is appealing the ruling. 

In an email to New York Focus, Ethan Cohen, an attorney for Miller, argued the ruling  stemmed from the city’s “misleading narrative” and failures by Miller’s previous attorney to respond to key court filings.

“The City appears more focused on making an example of this property owner than on upholding the fundamental principles of due process and fairness. In doing so, it continues to defend a judgment built on distortion, silence, and procedural gamesmanship rather than truth,” Cohen said.

Landlords have attributed the number of distressed buildings to rising insurance costs and to the state’s 2019 rent reforms, which they say limit their ability to raise revenue in order to make necessary repairs. Tenant advocates point to some landlords’ neglect and to the city’s lax code enforcement. 

In January, Mamdani appointed the veteran housing official Dina Levy to lead HPD. In a March city council hearing, Levy told lawmakers that the agency “need[s] to do better” and that it “cannot let the shortcomings of our past limit our vision for what is possible for our future.”  

“We must be the ones to end this cycle, to ensure that future generations of tenants will not have the same stories to tell 20 years from now,” Levy said.

The agency she took over had closed over 800,000 violations and initiated emergency repairs on more than 170,000 apartment units in 2025, the most in the past five years. At the same time, however, HPD became slower to take landlords to court. Prior to 2020, the agency opened between 500 and 600 so-called “comprehensive litigation” cases each year. But despite a surge in violations issued, HPD initiated just 134 such cases in 2025.

“I would love for HPD to seek these civil penalties more frequently. But you just don’t see them do it very often,” said Anna Luft, associate director for Housing Policy and Advocacy at New York Legal Assistance Group, an advocacy and legal nonprofit that successfully sued the city to make housing code violations more transparent.  

One reason the city and HPD may have been reluctant to aggressively pursue civil penalties in the past is that doing so could lead landlords to abandon buildings and ultimately force the city to take them over, along with their mortgages and unpaid bills, a senior housing attorney at a major legal nonprofit said. 

“[HPD is] sort of walking this line because it doesn’t want to bankrupt landlords, who might just walk away from these buildings,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations with HPD officials.

But the agency’s attitude may be changing. In May, the city announced it had secured a record-breaking penalty against another negligent Bronx landlord to the tune of $31 million. In the press release, the mayor called for a “preservation buyer” to purchase and maintain the two large towers, which are in the midst of foreclosure proceedings.

But more than 140,000 pest violations — 35 percent of the total number issued since January 2019, when the law took effect — have remained active.

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who co-sponsored the asthma bill while serving on the City Council, said the city must uphold its commitments. 

“New York City needs to follow through on that accountability,” Reynoso, who is now running for Congress, said in a statement to New York Focus. “That means providing HPD with the funding it needs to conduct inspections and imposing real consequences on landlords who fail to protect their tenants.”

The city also passed legislation to mandate faster repairs of self-closing fire-rated doors following the 2022 Twin Parks fire, which claimed 17 lives in the high-rise Belmont neighborhood in the Bronx. Investigators later determined that the deaths were caused by smoke inhalation from hallways and apartment doors that failed to close automatically. 

When the new laws were passed, Oswald Feliz, a New York City councilmember representing the Belmont area and chair of the then newly formed fire prevention task force, said that the city “cannot allow another similar tragedy to ever happen again. These fire safety bills will ensure that self-closing door laws are scrupulously followed and enforced.” 

Yet more than 53,000 — nearly one in five — self-closing door and other egress violations issued since the Twin Parks fire remain outstanding. Feliz did not respond to requests for comment from New York Focus. 

In fact, the number of egress violations more than tripled from 2019 to 2025, becoming the most commonly reported type of Class C violation last year.

HPD said the agency has dedicated resources to ramp up inspections and re-inspections, and that 75 percent of the self-closing door violations issued between 2024 and 2026 have been resolved.