← All guides · Look up an address

Which NYC building violations actually cost you money

By Brian · 2026-08-11 · Updated 2026-08-16

A two-family in Bushwick comes back with fourteen violations, three of them from 1994: a cracked sidewalk slab, and a line still marked IN VIOLATION with $1,600 owed. Your broker says every building on the block looks like this, and is probably right about that much. Neither fact tells you which of the fourteen becomes yours.

The short answer: sidewalk first, then anything that blocks a sign-off

Roughly in order of how likely an open violation is to cost the next owner money:

DOT sidewalk violations aren't Buildings violations at all, so people misfile them. Under Admin Code 7-210 the owner abutting the sidewalk has to maintain it. They top this list for the enforcement path: 75 days to repair after a notice, then DOT can do the work and bill for it under 19-152. They're also the easiest defect to price, because the city records the square footage. One carve-out, covering much of the housing stock this guide is about: 7-210 did not shift injury liability for owner-occupied one-, two- and three-family homes. The repair obligation still falls to them.

DOB safety violations are periodic-inspection failures: facade under Local Law 11/FISP, gas piping under LL152, elevators, parking structures, retaining walls. The obligation to file and repair recurs on a cycle, indefinitely. A facade cycle on a mid-rise runs into capital-project money, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars past anything a fine would cost.

DOB BIS violations, the general construction and structural stream, stay open until someone files a certificate of correction and DOB dismisses it. They don't age out. A twenty-year-old open one matters because it can sit between the building and a sign-off you need.

ECB violations look the scariest and are most often somebody else's bill. More below.

HPD housing maintenance violations are conditions a tenant lives with: heat, mold, pests, lead paint, plumbing, with Class C meaning immediately hazardous. Renting, this is the most decision-relevant record on the page. Buying, it says how the building has been run.

Why the city runs two violation systems at once

DOB's violation record is a records system: an inspector observes a condition and writes it against the premises. The record then stays open until the condition is certified corrected. Think of it as a filing cabinet with a state machine attached.

The ECB was never that. It's a tribunal, chartered separately under NYC Charter 1049-a to hear notices of violation and impose civil penalties: a summons goes to a respondent, and a hearing produces a decision. Local Law 35 of 2008 placed it inside OATH, so the hearing paperwork says OATH while the violation still says ECB.

So they aren't two flavors of one thing. One is the record of the condition, the other the docket of the case about it. A cracked lintel produces a BIS violation (against the building) and an ECB summons (against a respondent), living in different systems, with different numbering, different status words and different lifespans.

That answers "what follows the building": the condition itself. An open BIS or safety violation waits for the next owner, because the obligation attaches to the premises. The penalty was assessed against whoever the summons named, and it doesn't automatically re-bill to you at closing. An eye-watering ECB total is frequently noise for that reason. Unpaid city penalties are the ones a title search exists to surface, and any number big enough to matter belongs with your title people.

Penalty imposed versus balance due

An ECB record lists two money figures, and only one of them is still live. The penalty imposed is what the tribunal assessed. The balance due is what is still owed. A five-figure penalty against a zero balance was litigated and paid years ago, and a report that shows you the first without the second is telling you about somebody's bad month in 2014.

That history is hard to assemble, and a report beats a search box for it in two ways. The city has changed the way it writes down a lot number over the decades and never went back to restate the old ones, so a violation written against a building in 1985 can be filed under a different version of that building's number than the one the same building answers to today. Roughly 1,500 violations issued before 2012 are still open under the older form. Search the modern way and none of them come back, which gives you a clean page for a building that is not clean. Nosy Neighbor asks for a building every way the city has ever written it down.

Status is the other half, and every agency spells "open" differently: ECB resolves to RESOLVE when paid or dismissed, and DEFAULT specifically means nobody turned up to the hearing; DOB's general violations use a category prefix; DOB safety violations are simply Active; HPD marks the subset serious enough to legally suspend rent; DOT sidewalk violations carry no status at all and are open until a dismissal date appears. Nosy Neighbor turns all five vocabularies into one answer, open or closed, which is most of the work in reading a violation history.

Why the raw count is the wrong number

Every article in this genre says to look for "a pattern of violations" and never defines a pattern, because a raw count is meaningless on its own. A 60-unit prewar rental generates HPD violations at a rate a two-family structurally cannot, and a renovated building collects DOB paperwork precisely because someone pulled permits and did the work properly.

So here is the pattern, defined. Scope first: this is the HPD housing-maintenance stream only, not the DOB or ECB streams above, counting violations still open as of August 2026, across all 768k residential tax lots in the city.

Read your building's row rather than the citywide average. Nine out of ten one- and two-family houses carry no open HPD violation at all, so if even a handful of that Bushwick fourteen is still open, the house is in the worst tenth of its class and the number means something. The same fourteen against a 40-unit rental lands mid-pack: half of buildings that size carry eleven or more.

The top of the table also runs against the intuition that bigger means worse. Buildings over 100 units carry a median of 3 open violations per 100 units, against 38 for the 6-to-19-unit band, because the large ones are professionally managed and the small ones are somebody's second job. The middle of the table is where a building is most likely to be run badly.

Then read the dates: fourteen violations across thirty years is a different building from fourteen in the last eighteen months.

What to check, in order

Open sidewalk violations first: cheapest to price, most likely to become yours. Then active DOB safety violations, the largest number if the building runs a facade or gas cycle. Then open BIS violations, asking of each whether it sits in front of a sign-off you'd need. Then ECB balance due, not penalty imposed. Read HPD Class C last if you're buying and first if you're renting.

Look up any NYC address to see all five streams on one page, already normalized.

The city updates all of this daily, and the ranking above is the order that matters: what attaches to the premises first, what was somebody else's bill last.