Which Landlords Get The Most Violations — And Why?

Walk down almost any block in New York City and you’ll see the same buildings show up in tenant stories, news headlines, and city data again and again. The same landlords, the same addresses, the same patterns: unsafe conditions, HPD complaints piling up, and a revolving door of frustrated tenants.

We tend to talk about “bad buildings” as if they’re random. They’re not. When we look closely at NYC building violations, eviction filings, ownership records, and neighborhood conditions, a clear picture emerges: a relatively small group of landlords and business models are responsible for a disproportionate share of the worst problems, and their decisions fall hardest on low-income and marginalized renters.

In this piece, we break down which landlords get the most violations, why those patterns exist, and what tenants, advocates, and policymakers can realistically do about it, especially in New York City’s complex enforcement landscape.

Understanding What Counts As A Landlord Violation

Before we talk about who racks up the most NYC building violations, we need to be clear on what actually counts as a violation, and what never gets recorded, even when conditions are bad.

Common Types Of Housing Code Violations

Housing violations usually fall into three overlapping buckets:

1. Health and safety violations

These are issues that can directly injure or sicken people:

• Mold and chronic dampness
• Rodents, roaches, and other pests
• Lead-based paint hazards, especially where children live
• Unsafe wiring, overloaded outlets, or exposed electrical components
• Gas leaks or unsafe gas lines
• Missing or broken smoke and carbon monoxide detectors

In NYC, many of these show up as Housing Maintenance Code violations issued by HPD or as DOB violations when they involve structural or life-safety systems. They’re not cosmetic: they’re about whether people can safely live in a unit.

2. Habitability and basic services

These are the classic “my landlord won’t fix it” problems:

• No heat or no hot water
• Broken or leaking plumbing, including sewer backups
• Roof leaks and ceiling collapses
• Broken locks, unsecured building entrances, or windows that don’t close
• Structural cracks, unstable stairs, missing handrails

Under NYC law, landlords must provide essential services like heat, hot water, and basic security. Failing to do that can generate serious HPD and DOB violations, and, in some cases, emergency repair actions by the city.

3. Legal and administrative violations

Some violations aren’t about a leaking ceiling: they’re about the landlord ignoring the rules that keep buildings safe:

• Illegal basement or cellar apartments
• Overcrowded units or apartments chopped into smaller rooms
• Failure to register rental units with the city
• Operating without required permits or certificates of occupancy
• Ignoring official orders to correct conditions

These often appear in DOB violations or registration records. A building might look “fine enough” during a quick visit but still be loaded with legal violations that put tenants at risk, especially in a fire, flood, or other emergency.

How Complaints, Inspections, And Fines Actually Work

Most violations start the same way: with a complaint, an inspection, or a pattern the city can’t ignore.

Complaint-driven enforcement

In New York, much of the system is complaint-driven. A tenant calls 311 or goes online to report a problem. The city sends an inspector from HPD or DOB, and if they confirm the condition, they issue a violation and an order to correct it.

That sounds simple, but in practice many tenants never complain. They’re afraid of retaliation, rent hikes, or non-renewals: they don’t know their rights: or they’re just exhausted from past experience.

Proactive inspections

Some cities run proactive, routine inspections of rental buildings regardless of complaints. New York has pieces of this, like gas piping inspections, facade inspections, and certain program-based inspections, but there’s nothing like a full, citywide proactive rental inspection regime. Where proactive inspections exist, total violation counts usually go up, but that’s because more hidden problems are finally documented.

Escalating penalties

Once a violation exists, the process typically looks like this:

1. Order to correct issued with a deadline.
2. If ignored, civil penalties and fines, which can compound daily in serious cases.
3. For dangerous or chronically neglected buildings, the city can pursue rent escrow, emergency repairs billed to the owner, liens, or, in extreme situations, receivership or condemnation.

In NYC, HPD’s Emergency Repair Program and DOB vacate orders are examples of this escalation. But whether penalties bite depends heavily on the owner’s business model, and the city’s willingness to follow through.

Why Some Violations Are More Serious Than Others

Not all violations carry the same weight. In New York City, HPD classifies violations by severity, and DOB separately flags immediately hazardous conditions.

• A missing smoke detector or lack of heat in winter can be an emergency.
• Peeling paint in a child-occupied apartment can signal serious lead risk.
• Minor peeling paint in a hallway might be logged but not treated as urgent.

When we talk about “landlords with the most violations,” we have to distinguish between:

• Owners with lots of minor paperwork or maintenance issues in big portfolios, and
• Owners whose buildings rack up class C or immediately hazardous violations for heat, hot water, fire safety, or structural stability.

The landlords we really worry about aren’t just at the top of the raw violation count list. They’re the ones repeatedly cited for serious, uncorrected conditions that make homes unlivable, often in the same addresses, year after year.

The Landlords Who Rack Up The Most Violations

When researchers link code enforcement records, HPD complaints, DOB violations, crime data, and eviction filings, a pattern shows up across cities: a small group of landlords and property companies are responsible for a huge share of the worst problems. Milwaukee research, for example, found that just 1.9% of landlords owned properties with over half of rental-property assaults and high violation rates.

New York has its own version of this pattern. The worst-offending owners aren’t random: they tend to fall into a few categories.

Large Corporate Landlords And Portfolio Owners

Large portfolio landlords, think hundreds or thousands of units, often dominate the top of violation lists for a simple reason: scale. When you own dozens of older rent-stabilized or low-rent properties, even routine issues add up quickly.

But scale isn’t the whole story. The landlords that really stand out share a few traits:

• Aggressive, profit-first business models: high rents relative to quality, lots of eviction filings, heavy fee structures.
• Acquisitions of already-distressed buildings in lower-income neighborhoods, often financed with debt that assumes rising cash flow.
• Centralized maintenance systems that are good on paper but slow or indifferent when tenants actually need help.

In NYC, this is often where we see big gaps between glossy investor presentations and day-to-day reality. Public “worst landlord” watchlists, city council hearings, and investigative journalism routinely highlight large owners whose buildings carry hundreds of open violations across portfolios.

These landlords tend to:

• Accumulate DOB violations for unpermitted work or unsafe structures.
• Rack up extensive HPD complaints for heat, hot water, leaks, pests, and mold.
• Cycle through temporary fixes without addressing root problems like aging roofs, plumbing stacks, or boiler systems.

Small “Mom-And-Pop” Owners

Small owners, those with a handful of units or a single small building, don’t usually dominate the top of citywide violation lists by total numbers. But that doesn’t mean they’re all doing fine.

Where we see higher violation rates among small landlords, it often comes down to under-capitalization and lack of professional management more than deliberate extraction:

• Rent income barely covers the mortgage and taxes, leaving no cushion for big repairs.
• One major event, like a boiler failure or roof leak, triggers a cascade of deferred maintenance problems.
• Owners may not know code requirements or may hope that “patching it for now” will be enough to keep inspectors away.

For tenants, the experience can be just as bad: no heat in winter, leaks that linger for months, slow or hostile responses to HPD complaints. The difference is that some small owners genuinely feel stuck, while others edge closer to classic slumlord behavior over time.

Nonprofit, Mission-Driven, And Public Housing Landlords

Nonprofits and public agencies can also show high violation counts, but the dynamics are different.

• Nonprofit affordable housing providers often operate older buildings acquired from troubled owners, with chronic capital needs and complex funding rules. They face intense pressure to keep rents low while costs rise.
• Public housing authorities, including NYCHA in New York, manage enormous inventories built in the mid-20th century. Decades of underfunding and aging infrastructure produce staggering repair backlogs.

These landlords usually have stronger oversight and some built-in accountability: boards, regulators, public reporting, and mission statements that explicitly prioritize tenants. But from a tenant’s perspective, the distinction can feel academic if there’s mold in the bedroom or a broken elevator.

The key difference is intent and room to fix things: nonprofit or public landlords typically aren’t trying to squeeze maximum profit from deteriorating housing in the way some private, extractive owners are. Yet their tenants still live with the daily reality of chronic violations, and they, too, show up in NYC building violations data.

Geography, Building Age, And Property Type

Who gets the most violations isn’t just about who owns the building. It’s also about where the building is, how old it is, and what kind of housing it provides.

Older Buildings And Deferred Maintenance

Across cities, older buildings have more violations. That’s not surprising: roofs age, pipes corrode, wiring standards change, and materials like lead paint or asbestos remain in place.

In NYC, much of the rental housing stock was built before World War II. These buildings can be beautiful, and deeply fragile. When owners invest steadily in maintenance, they can function well for generations. When they don’t, physical systems begin to fail in predictable ways:

• Recurrent leaks from aging roofs and parapets
• Frequent boiler breakdowns and heating system failures
• Old wiring that can’t safely handle modern loads
• Window frames, stairs, and railings that simply wear out

Violations in these buildings are often a visible symptom of long-term deferred maintenance, not just a one-off missed repair.

High-Rent Versus Low-Rent Neighborhoods

Violations don’t spread evenly across a city map. They cluster in lower-rent, higher-poverty neighborhoods where tenants have fewer options and less leverage.

In New York, publicly available HPD and DOB data show heavier concentrations of serious violations in parts of the Bronx, northern Manhattan, central Brooklyn, and pockets of Queens, areas where incomes are lower, overcrowding is more common, and tenants may be dealing with immigration concerns, language barriers, or prior evictions.

Why does this matter?

• Tenants in these neighborhoods may fear retaliation if they complain to HPD.
• Landlords know there’s a steady supply of renters with few alternatives.
• Buildings may have been bought and sold repeatedly by speculative investors betting on future appreciation.

By contrast, in high-rent, gentrified neighborhoods, violations absolutely exist, but tenants often have more ability to move, organize, or bring attention to conditions. Some problems get fixed faster simply because the politics and media attention are different.

Single-Family Rentals Versus Multifamily Complexes

Large multifamily buildings and complexes naturally generate more recorded violations because they hold dozens or hundreds of units. A 100-unit Bronx building with 50 open HPD violations isn’t unusual in troubled portfolios.

Single-family rentals and small walk-ups tell a more complicated story:

• They’re less visible to regulators and the press.
• Tenants may not realize they’re covered by the same habitability standards.
• Complaints can feel riskier when the landlord lives upstairs or next door.

So while big complexes often top public violation lists, many of the most dangerous or unstable situations in distressed single-family rentals may never show up in the official numbers at all. The worst landlords in this segment can fly under the radar until a serious incident, like a fire or structural collapse, forces DOB involvement.

The Business Models Behind High-Violation Landlords

When we look past individual horror stories, the same business strategies appear over and over in high-violation portfolios. These aren’t random mistakes: they’re part of how some landlords make money.

Profit-First Strategies And Slumlord Practices

At one end of the spectrum are what researchers sometimes call “extractive” landlords, owners whose profit model depends on squeezing as much cash as possible from low-rent buildings while putting off repairs.

Common patterns include:

• Frequent rent hikes and fees that aren’t matched by improvements.
• High eviction filing rates used as a management tool, not a last resort.
• Targeting vulnerable tenants, those with immigration concerns, prior evictions, or limited English proficiency, who are less likely to complain.
• Minimal spending on preventive maintenance: staff are told to do the cheapest, fastest patch jobs.

The result is predictable: a growing pile of HPD complaints, DOB violations, and, too often, increased crime and safety incidents in and around the buildings.

In NYC, this model often plays out in older rent-stabilized buildings where owners seek to push out long-term tenants and reposition the property. Chronic violations can become a pressure tactic, making life uncomfortable enough that people leave on their own.

Under-Capitalized Owners And Cash Flow Problems

Not every high-violation landlord is deliberately running a slum. Some are simply in over their heads.

Under-capitalized owners, small or large, depend on monthly rent to pay for almost everything: mortgage, taxes, insurance, and maintenance. When something goes wrong, they don’t have reserves.

Common triggers:

• Sudden, large repair needs (a failed boiler, a collapsed sewer line).
• Rising insurance and tax bills in neighborhoods where rents can’t climb much higher.
• Vacancies after a fire, flood, or major incident that lowers cash flow.

Instead of raising new capital or selling, some owners begin quietly cutting corners: skipping annual tune-ups, delaying roof work, ignoring smaller leaks, letting hallways and common areas deteriorate. Over time, those choices translate into more DOB violations, HPD complaints, and serious hazards for tenants.

Out-Of-Town And Anonymous Ownership Structures

Another recurring pattern in high-violation buildings is distance and anonymity.

• Owners live in another state, or another country, and visit rarely.
• Properties are held through complex webs of LLCs that make it hard to see who eventually controls them.
• Management is outsourced repeatedly, with little continuity or accountability.

In New York, investigative reporters, tenant organizers, and the city’s own “worst landlord” lists have repeatedly traced clusters of dangerous buildings back to a handful of recurring names behind layers of LLCs.

Distance isn’t inherently bad, but it often correlates with:

• Slower responses to emergencies.
• Less local knowledge of NYC property compliance rules.
• A business mindset that treats buildings as spreadsheet assets rather than homes.

When something goes wrong, say, a major DOB violation for unsafe construction or an HPD order to restore heat, it can take longer to get action, because decision-makers are far removed from daily life in the building.

How Policy And Enforcement Shape Who Gets Violations

The profile of “who gets the most violations” isn’t fixed. It changes with policy choices, staffing levels, and how seriously a city decides to enforce its own rules.

Complaint-Driven Systems Versus Proactive Inspections

In a purely complaint-driven system, the landlords with the most recorded violations are often those whose tenants are most willing or able to call for help. That can bias data in unexpected ways.

• Buildings with organized tenant associations may show higher violation counts simply because residents work together to report and document conditions.
• Buildings where tenants fear retaliation may have few official violations even when conditions are dire.

Cities that add proactive inspection programs, periodic, systematic checks of rentals, start catching:

• Illegal cellar apartments and overcrowded units.
• Chronic mold and dampness issues that tenants assumed were “just part of living here.”
• Aging systems (elevators, boilers, wiring) that hadn’t caused a crisis yet.

In New York, programs like HPD’s inspection process and various DOB initiatives move in this direction, but they still depend heavily on tenant complaints and limited staff.

Gaps In Data, Transparency, And Follow-Through

Even in a data-rich city like NYC, it’s surprisingly hard to get a full picture of a landlord’s track record.

• Ownership is recorded in property records and corporate filings.
• Violations live in separate HPD and DOB databases.
• Eviction filings live in court systems.
• Subsidies and regulatory agreements sit with other agencies.

Without connecting these dots, chronic bad actors can keep operating. That’s why tenant groups, researchers, and tools like ViolationWatch have pushed for more integrated, public-facing data that lets renters see patterns across a landlord’s entire portfolio, not just one address.

Follow-through is the other piece. Issuing a violation is step one: actually collecting fines, enforcing orders, and escalating against repeat offenders is where many systems stumble.

The Role Of Politics, Lobbying, And Local Priorities

Enforcement intensity is eventually a political choice.

• Landlord and real estate lobbying can shape how aggressively cities fund inspectors, set penalties, and publish data.
• Tenant organizing and media attention can push in the other direction, demanding more inspections, higher fines, and public “worst landlord” lists.

New York’s own enforcement landscape has evolved through exactly these battles. HPD’s Worst Landlord Watchlist and various council bills around right-to-counsel, lead paint enforcement, and DOB transparency didn’t appear on their own. They came out of years of pressure from tenants, advocates, and journalists documenting buildings where violations never seemed to end.

In short, which landlords show up as the “worst” on paper is shaped not only by their behavior but by how seriously we decide to hold them accountable.

Who Is Most Affected By Chronic Violations

Behind every cluster of DOB violations or HPD complaints are real people living with the consequences, often for years.

Tenants Facing Discrimination And Retaliation

Tenants who already face discrimination, because of race, immigration status, disability, family size, or prior involvement with the criminal legal system, are more likely to be stuck in buildings run by high-violation landlords.

They also face greater risks when they speak up:

• Threats of non-renewal or sudden rent increases.
• Baseless eviction filings used to intimidate.
• Harassment, including repeated visits, intrusive “inspections,” or bogus accusations of lease violations.

In this environment, many serious problems never become official NYC building violations because complaints are never filed, or tenants move out quietly rather than fight.

Low-Income Communities And Rent-Burdened Households

Low-income and rent-burdened tenants are caught in a bind. They can’t easily move to better housing, yet they’re paying a high share of their income for homes that may be unsafe or unstable.

Research consistently shows that Black and Latino tenants are more likely to live in poorly maintained housing and more likely to experience retaliation or displacement when they push back. In New York, this maps onto neighborhoods where violation densities, eviction filings, and speculative ownership activity overlap.

For families already struggling with childcare, shift work, and healthcare costs, navigating HPD complaints, DOB inspections, and court appearances to enforce basic NYC property compliance can feel like a second job.

Health Impacts: Mold, Pests, Extreme Temperatures, And Safety Hazards

Chronic violations aren’t just inconvenient. They’re a public health problem.

Common impacts include:

• Respiratory illness and asthma from mold, dampness, and pests.
• Injuries from broken stairs, missing handrails, loose tiles, or unsecured windows.
• Mental health stress from constant leaks, noise, and fear of fires or structural failures.
• Heat and cold-related illness when landlords fail to provide adequate heating or cooling, especially during extreme weather.

Children, seniors, and people with existing health conditions are most vulnerable. When these patterns repeat across many buildings owned by the same landlords, violations cease to be an individual property issue and become a form of structural inequality.

Warning Signs Of A High-Violation Landlord

Tenants can’t see an HPD database from the sidewalk. But there are red flags that often show up long before you ever look up NYC building violations.

Red Flags Before You Sign A Lease

Here are signs we’ve seen repeatedly in buildings later revealed to have long violation histories:

• No written lease or resistance to putting things in writing. The landlord insists you pay in cash and “trust” that everything’s fine.
• Refusal to share basic information like who actually owns the building, who manages it, or how to reach maintenance after hours.
• Rushed showings where you’re discouraged from opening closets, checking under sinks, or looking in the basement.
• Visible issues downplayed with vague promises: peeling paint in a child’s bedroom, strong mold odors, roaches in common areas.
• Frequent ownership changes through a string of LLCs, or online reviews and news stories that mention harassment, court cases, or long-standing problems.

If you’re apartment hunting in NYC, it’s worth taking a few minutes to check public data before you commit. For free lookups, use our NYC violation lookup tool to see recent HPD complaints and DOB violations tied to the address.

Signals During Walk-Throughs And Early Repairs

Even if everything looks okay at first glance, certain details can hint at a deeper pattern:

• Missing or non-working smoke and CO detectors. Landlords who neglect these basics often neglect bigger things.
• Obvious water damage, bubbling paint, soft drywall, stained ceilings, especially if it’s been painted over recently.
• Pests visible in daylight or heavy droppings in common areas.
• Security issues like broken front-door locks, propped-open doors, or windows that don’t close.
• Defensive or hostile responses to your first repair request, especially if the issue involves heat, hot water, or plumbing.

One or two minor problems don’t automatically mean you’re dealing with a chronic violator. But when several of these signs appear together, and especially when they’re paired with a history of HPD complaints or DOB violations, it’s a strong signal to proceed carefully or look elsewhere if you can.

How Tenants, Advocates, And Cities Can Respond

The landlords with the most violations didn’t get there overnight, and they won’t change course just because someone’s upset. But tenants, advocates, and cities do have tools, especially in a place like New York, where public data and legal protections are relatively strong on paper.

Steps Tenants Can Take To Document And Report Violations

For individual tenants, the basics matter more than anything:

1. Document everything.

• Take photos and videos of conditions, with dates visible where possible.
• Keep copies of all texts, emails, and written repair requests.
• Maintain a simple log of when you reported issues and how (or if) the landlord responded.

1. Report problems through official channels.

In NYC, that often means calling 311 or using the city’s online systems to trigger HPD or DOB inspections. This is how HPD complaints become formal violations that the city can track and enforce.

1. Talk to neighbors.

Chronic problems rarely affect only one unit. Building-wide issues like heat, hot water, pests, or leaks are stronger, and safer, for tenants to raise collectively.

1. Seek support.

Legal aid organizations, tenant unions, and housing clinics can help you understand your rights, prepare for Housing Court, or push city agencies to escalate against repeat offenders.

Get instant alerts whenever your building receives a new violation, sign up for real-time monitoring with building violation alerts so you’re not the last to know when HPD or DOB takes action.

Tools For Researching A Landlord’s History

Information won’t fix a leak, but it can change how you negotiate, organize, or decide whether to move in.

In New York City, you can:

• Search HPD and DOB open data and complaint portals to see violation histories and enforcement actions.
• Use public tools like NYC violation lookup tool to pull multiple data sources into one place.
• Look up court records for eviction filings tied to your building or landlord.
• Check city “worst landlord” lists and investigative reporting for background on large portfolio owners.

Platforms like ViolationWatch are built to make this research faster and more accessible, especially for tenants who don’t have time to dig through multiple government databases.

Policy Ideas To Reduce Chronic Violations

Individual tenants can only do so much in a system where chronic neglect is profitable. That’s where policy comes in.

Reforms that researchers and advocates increasingly point to include:

• Expanding proactive inspection programs, especially in high-risk neighborhoods and aging building stock.
• Publishing landlord-level dashboards that combine HPD complaints, DOB violations, and building size so chronic bad actors can’t hide behind LLCs.
• Strengthening anti-retaliation protections and funding right-to-counsel in Housing Court so tenants can report issues without losing their homes.
• Using tools like rent escrow and receivership more aggressively against owners with large numbers of uncorrected, serious violations.
• Regulating high-risk ownership models, including large extractive portfolios and opaque LLC webs, by tying financial or licensing requirements to eviction patterns and code histories.

Cities that take these steps tend to shift the balance: landlords who rely on neglect and opacity see their business models become riskier, while compliant owners face a more level playing field.

Conclusion

When we ask which landlords get the most violations, we’re really asking two questions: who holds the power in our housing system, and how do they use it?

The evidence from New York and other cities points to a familiar pattern. The worst violation records cluster among large, profit-driven or under-capitalized owners operating older, low-rent buildings in neighborhoods with weak enforcement and limited tenant power. Their decisions fall hardest on low-income, Black, Latino, immigrant, and otherwise marginalized renters who have the least room to walk away.

But that pattern isn’t inevitable. It’s the product of specific choices, by investors, by regulators, and by local governments about what gets enforced, what gets funded, and whose complaints are taken seriously.

As tenants, advocates, and policymakers, we have levers:

• We can document and report violations instead of letting problems stay invisible.
• We can use tools that bring scattered data together and expose chronic offenders across portfolios.
• We can push for policies that make long-term neglect more expensive than basic maintenance.

NYC building violations are eventually a map of power and responsibility. The more clearly we see where patterns concentrate, by landlord, neighborhood, and building type, the better chance we have of shifting the system toward safe, stable, and genuinely affordable homes for the people who live in them.

Frequently Asked Questions About Landlords With the Most Violations

Which landlords get the most violations in NYC, and what do they have in common?

NYC building violations concentrate among a relatively small group of landlords. The worst records are usually large, profit-driven or under-capitalized owners of older, low-rent buildings in lower-income neighborhoods. Their portfolios show recurring HPD complaints, DOB violations, frequent eviction filings, and long-term deferred maintenance across many addresses.

What kinds of NYC building violations are considered the most serious?

The most serious NYC building violations are those that threaten health and safety: no heat or hot water, gas leaks, unsafe wiring, structural instability, missing smoke or carbon monoxide detectors, severe mold, and lead hazards in homes with children. HPD and DOB classify these as immediately hazardous or class C violations.

How can I check if my landlord has a lot of NYC building violations?

You can search HPD and DOB online databases using your building address to see open violations, complaints, and enforcement actions. It also helps to check Housing Court records for eviction filings and consult public “worst landlord” lists or violation lookup tools that aggregate data across an owner’s entire portfolio.

Why do violations cluster in certain NYC neighborhoods and building types?

Violations often cluster in older, low-rent buildings in higher-poverty neighborhoods. These areas have aging infrastructure, speculative ownership, and tenants with fewer housing options and greater fear of retaliation. Large multifamily buildings generate more recorded violations, while small rentals may be under-enforced and problems stay hidden until a crisis occurs.

How long does a NYC landlord have to fix a housing code violation?

Timeframes depend on severity and agency. For the most hazardous HPD violations, like lack of heat or hot water, correction is typically required within 24 hours. Less urgent but still serious issues may carry 30–90 day deadlines. If deadlines are ignored, penalties, emergency repairs, and liens can follow.

Can landlords with many violations lose their buildings or be forced out?

Yes, in extreme cases. When landlords repeatedly ignore serious violations, cities can escalate beyond fines by placing buildings into rent escrow, appointing a court-ordered administrator or receiver, or in rare situations moving toward condemnation. These tools are usually reserved for chronic, high-violation landlords who refuse to correct dangerous conditions.