The 2026 NYC Worst Landlord Watchlist

Every January, New York City gets a reminder of just how bad things can get for renters. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams released the 2026 Worst Landlord Watchlist on January 21, 2026, and the numbers this year are staggering, record-high violation counts, familiar names cycling back onto the list, and a growing web of LLCs designed to keep the worst offenders anonymous.

But here’s the thing: the official NYC worst landlord list only tells part of the story. It relies on HPD violation data, housing code stuff like heat failures, lead paint, and pest infestations. What it doesn’t capture are the thousands of Department of Buildings (DOB) violations for structural hazards, illegal construction, and unsafe conditions, or the FDNY violations for fire safety failures that put lives at immediate risk.

We dug into the raw violation records across all three agencies to build a more complete picture. What we found should concern every tenant, policymaker, and housing advocate in New York City.

01 · THE OFFICIALThe Official List vs. The Real Picture

The Public Advocate’s methodology is straightforward: rank landlords by their average number of open HPD violations per month over a 12-month window, this year covering December 2024 through November 2025. It’s a solid approach for spotlighting the most egregious housing code offenders. And it works. The list generates headlines, embarrasses slumlords, and gives tenants a tool for organizing.

But HPD violations are just one slice of the data.

When we cross-reference the official watchlist against DOB NOW and FDNY records, a different landscape emerges. Landlords who rank in the middle of the Public Advocate’s list, say, position 40 or 50, sometimes shoot into the top 10 when you factor in active DOB violations for illegal conversions, structurally compromised facades, or missing certificates of occupancy. Some don’t appear on the HPD-based list at all because their buildings have fewer housing code complaints but are riddled with construction and fire safety violations.

Take, for example, landlords operating primarily commercial mixed-use buildings. HPD’s jurisdiction focuses on residential units, so a building owner with serious DOB and FDNY infractions across a portfolio of mixed-use properties might never trigger the Public Advocate’s radar. We identified at least 14 property owners with 500+ combined DOB and FDNY violations who don’t appear anywhere on the 2026 watchlist.

That’s not a criticism of the Public Advocate’s office, they’re working within a specific mandate. It’s an argument for a more comprehensive violation tracking system, which is exactly what we’ve been building at ViolationWatch.NYC. Our free violation lookup tool pulls from DOB, HPD, and FDNY databases simultaneously, giving tenants and advocates the full picture on any building or landlord in the city.

The official list also struggles with a structural problem: it ranks by average open violations, which can obscure landlords who own fewer buildings but maintain horrific conditions in each one. A landlord with 2 buildings and 400 violations per building looks different in an averaging formula than one with 60 buildings and 150 violations per building, even though both scenarios represent serious neglect.

02 · THE 25The 25 Worst Landlords by Total Violation Count

When we rank landlords by total violation count across HPD, DOB, and FDNY, the top of the list is dominated by a familiar operation.

#1 and #2: Margaret Brunn & Donald Hastings (A&E Real Estate Holdings)

For the first time in the watchlist’s history, the top two positions belong to individuals tied to the same company. Brunn and Hastings, operating under the A&E Real Estate Holdings umbrella, have accumulated approximately 9,000 combined violations across 60 buildings. That’s a record. The violations span the full severity spectrum, Class C immediately hazardous conditions (think no heat in January, lead paint exposure, gas leaks), Class B hazardous conditions (vermin infestations, broken windows, defective plumbing), and Class A non-hazardous violations.

To put 9,000 violations in context: that’s 150 violations per building on average. The citywide average for open HPD violations alone is roughly 0.2 Class C and 0.8 Class B violations per unit. A&E’s buildings are running at 2.5 Class C and 4.5 Class B violations per unit, more than 10 times the city average for the most dangerous categories.

#3: Barry Singer, approximately 3,000 violations across 15 buildings. Singer’s portfolio is smaller but arguably more concentrated in its neglect: that’s 200 violations per building.

The rest of the top 10:

We’re publishing the complete top 25 with building-level breakdowns in our full violation database. You can search any landlord name or building address to see the complete violation history.

One pattern we noticed across the top 25: heavy concentration in the Bronx and Brooklyn, with northern Manhattan also appearing frequently. These are neighborhoods with high proportions of rent-stabilized units, a correlation that housing advocates have flagged for years. Neglect, in many cases, appears to be a deliberate strategy to push tenants out of below-market units.

03 · LLC SHELLLLC Shell Game — Who Really Owns These Buildings

The Brunn-Hastings situation at A&E Real Estate Holdings illustrates a problem that’s been plaguing NYC housing enforcement for decades: the LLC shell game.

Here’s how it works. A single real estate operator forms a separate LLC for each building, or sometimes each floor of a building. On paper, “123 Main St LLC” owns one property and “456 Broadway LLC” owns another. They appear to be unrelated entities. But trace the filings through ACRIS (Automated City Register Information System) and you’ll find the same registered agent, the same managing member, the same mailing address.

A&E Real Estate’s 60 buildings are spread across dozens of individual LLCs. This makes it harder for HPD to aggregate violations under a single owner, harder for tenants to organize across buildings, and harder for housing court judges to see the full pattern of neglect. When Margaret Brunn appears in court representing “789 Prospect LLC,” the judge may not immediately recognize she’s connected to 59 other buildings with similar conditions.

New York’s LLC transparency law, which went into effect in 2024, was supposed to help with this. It requires LLCs to disclose their beneficial owners to the state. But enforcement has been uneven, and the data doesn’t always flow into the city’s property databases in a usable way. We’ve found that roughly 30% of the LLCs associated with top-25 worst landlords still lack publicly accessible beneficial ownership information in city records.

At ViolationWatch.NYC, we’ve been working to connect these dots. Our system cross-references ACRIS deed transfers, DOB permit applications, and HPD registration records to link LLCs back to their actual human owners. When you search an address on our platform, we show you not just the violations on that building, but the full portfolio of the connected owner, every LLC, every building, every violation.

Subscribe to our building violation alerts to get notified when new violations are filed against your landlord’s full portfolio, not just your individual address.

04 · GETTING WORSEGetting Worse vs. Getting Better

The overall trend isn’t good. The 2026 watchlist covers 691 buildings housing 15,739 units, and the average building on the list has 122 open violations. That’s up from prior years.

The top two landlords, Brunn and Hastings, set the all-time violation record for the watchlist. And they’re not alone in moving the wrong direction. We tracked year-over-year violation trajectories for every landlord in the top 100, and approximately 62% saw their total violation counts increase from the previous reporting period.

Who’s Getting Worse

The most alarming trajectories belong to mid-list landlords who are rapidly accumulating new violations without resolving old ones. Several owners in the 30–60 range on the official list saw 40–70% increases in total open violations year over year. These are landlords on the verge of becoming the next Margaret Brunn, except nobody’s talking about them yet.

NYCHA, the city’s public housing authority, remains a category unto itself. With approximately 612,000 open work orders, a figure that has barely budged, NYCHA’s scale of disrepair dwarfs any private landlord. The Public Advocate’s list excludes NYCHA because it’s a government entity, but tenants living in public housing face many of the same conditions: mold, pest infestations, broken elevators, heat outages.

Who’s Getting Better

It’s not all bad news. Some past offenders have genuinely improved, often because of legal pressure. Daniel Ohebshalom, a repeat worst-landlord-list fixture, was incarcerated for housing-related offenses, and his properties have since been placed under more attentive management.

A handful of landlords in the 50–100 range on previous lists have dropped off entirely after settling HPD enforcement actions and completing repairs. We identified about 15 landlords who appeared on the 2025 list but not the 2026 list, with violation counts dropping by 50% or more. In most of these cases, the improvements followed either criminal prosecution, civil penalties exceeding $100,000, or organized tenant action that attracted media coverage.

The takeaway? Violations don’t fix themselves. Improvement almost always follows some form of external pressure, legal, financial, or public.

05 · BOROUGH SPOTLIGHTBorough Spotlight — The Worst Landlords by Borough

Violation patterns vary significantly by borough, reflecting differences in housing stock age, rent regulation density, and enforcement resources.

The Bronx

The Bronx dominates the watchlist again this year. It’s home to the highest concentration of top-25 landlords and the highest per-unit violation rates in the city. Many of the worst buildings are pre-war walk-ups in neighborhoods like Highbridge, Mott Haven, and University Heights. Claudette Henry’s 25-building portfolio is heavily Bronx-concentrated, with violations skewing toward heat/hot water failures and pest infestations, the signature neglect patterns of aging Bronx housing stock.

Brooklyn

Brooklyn accounts for the second-largest share of watchlist buildings. Brunn and Hastings’ A&E Real Estate portfolio includes multiple Brooklyn properties, and a January 2026 tenant rally at 80 Woodruff Avenue in Flatbush drew significant attention to conditions in one of their buildings. Brooklyn’s violation profile is broader than the Bronx’s, we see more DOB violations for illegal conversions and unpermitted construction, reflecting the borough’s intense development pressure. Yonatan Bahumi (1,801 violations, 34 buildings) and David Tennenbaum (1,549 violations, 14 buildings) both run heavily Brooklyn-based portfolios.

Manhattan

Manhattan’s worst landlords tend to concentrate in Upper Manhattan, Washington Heights, Inwood, East Harlem, and the Lower East Side. The violation types here often involve elevator outages, facade hazards (Local Law 11 violations), and lead paint. Manhattan landlords on the watchlist generally have smaller portfolios but older buildings with complex maintenance needs they’re choosing to ignore.

Queens

Queens is underrepresented on the official list relative to its population, which likely reflects its higher proportion of owner-occupied buildings and newer housing stock. But that doesn’t mean Queens tenants are safe. We’ve identified clusters of DOB violations in neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Flushing tied to illegal basement conversions, a fire safety issue that HPD data alone won’t capture.

Staten Island

Staten Island has the fewest watchlist landlords, but the ones who appear tend to have extremely high per-building violation rates. The borough’s smaller scale means less media scrutiny and, often, slower enforcement response times.

You can explore borough-level violation data and find your building’s full history using our free lookup tool at ViolationWatch.NYC.

06 · WHAT TENANTSWhat Tenants Can Do

Data is only useful if it leads to action. Here’s what tenants in buildings owned by watchlist landlords, or any negligent landlord, can actually do.

1. Document everything. Photograph and video conditions in your apartment and common areas. Note dates, times, and any communication with your landlord or management company. This evidence matters in housing court.

2. File 311 complaints. Call 311 or use the NYC 311 website to report conditions. Every complaint generates a record and can trigger an HPD inspection. Be specific: “no heat since January 15” is more actionable than “building is cold.”

3. Request an HPD inspection. When you file a 311 complaint about housing conditions, HPD will schedule an inspection. If the inspector finds violations, they’re placed on the landlord’s record, and that’s what feeds into lists like the worst landlord watchlist. The more documented violations, the more leverage you have.

4. Organize your building. The Public Advocate’s office specifically encourages tenants to hold meetings in building common areas, canvass neighbors about repair needs, and present unified demands to management. Tenant associations have legal protections under NYC law and can negotiate collectively for repairs.

5. Attend ‘Rental Rip-Off’ hearings. The Public Advocate’s office holds public hearings where tenants can testify about conditions. These events generate press coverage and political pressure.

6. Go to Housing Court. Tenants can bring HP (Housing Part) actions in Housing Court to compel landlords to make repairs. You don’t need a lawyer, though free legal services are available through programs like the Right to Counsel initiative for income-eligible tenants.

7. Use violation data as leverage. This is where we come in. Before you negotiate with your landlord, file a complaint, or go to court, look up your building on ViolationWatch.NYC. Pull the full violation history from DOB, HPD, and FDNY. Bring printouts to hearings and meetings. Data changes the conversation, it’s much harder for a landlord to claim they’re “working on it” when you can show a judge 300 open violations across a 15-building portfolio.

Sign up for free building alerts on ViolationWatch.NYC to get notified every time a new violation is filed on your address or your landlord’s other properties.

07 · METHODOLOGYMethodology

Transparency matters, so here’s exactly how we compiled our analysis.

Data Sources:

• HPD Violations: Sourced from HPD Online, covering all open and closed housing code violations.
• DOB Violations: Sourced from DOB NOW, including Environmental Control Board (ECB) violations, DOB violations, and active complaints.
• FDNY Violations: Sourced from FDNY inspection records for fire code and life safety violations.
• Ownership Data: Cross-referenced through ACRIS deed records, HPD building registrations, and DOB permit filings.

Time Period: Our primary analysis covers December 2024 through November 2025, matching the Public Advocate’s reporting window. Year-over-year comparisons use the prior 12-month period (December 2023–November 2024).

Counting Method: We counted all open violations as of November 30, 2025, across all three agencies. Violations were attributed to the current registered owner as of that date. Where multiple LLCs were linked to the same beneficial owner through ACRIS and HPD registration records, violations were aggregated under the individual or corporate entity.

Severity Classification: HPD violations are classified as Class A (non-hazardous), Class B (hazardous), and Class C (immediately hazardous). DOB and FDNY violations don’t use this classification, so we weighted them by penalty severity and whether they involved immediately dangerous conditions.

Limitations: Our ownership linking methodology captures most but not all LLC connections. Some beneficial owners remain obscured even though the 2024 transparency law. We update our database continuously as new records become available.

Have questions about our data or methodology? Contact our team. We believe in agency records and accountable analysis, the same standards we’re demanding of the landlords on this list.

08 · FREQUENTLY ASKEDFrequently Asked Questions

Who are the worst landlords on the NYC worst landlord list 2026?

Margaret Brunn and Donald Hastings of A&E Real Estate Holdings top the 2026 NYC worst landlord list with approximately 9,000 combined violations across 60 buildings—a record high. Barry Singer ranks third with roughly 3,000 violations across 15 buildings, followed by Yonatan Bahumi, Claudette Henry, and David Tennenbaum.

How is the NYC worst landlord watchlist compiled?

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams ranks the city’s 100 worst landlords by their average number of open HPD violations per month over a 12-month window—December 2024 through November 2025 for the 2026 list. Violations are classified by severity: Class A (non-hazardous), Class B (hazardous), and Class C (immediately hazardous).

What is the LLC shell game used by NYC landlords to avoid accountability?

Many landlords create separate LLCs for each building they own, making it difficult for enforcement agencies and tenants to link properties to a single owner. A&E Real Estate Holdings, for example, spreads 60 buildings across dozens of LLCs. Despite New York’s 2024 LLC transparency law, roughly 30% of top-25 worst landlords’ LLCs still lack publicly accessible ownership data.

What can tenants do if their landlord is on the NYC worst landlord list?

Tenants should document all conditions with photos and dates, file specific 311 complaints to trigger HPD inspections, and organize building-wide tenant associations—which have legal protections under NYC law. Attending the Public Advocate’s ‘Rental Rip-Off’ hearings and filing HP actions in Housing Court can also compel repairs through legal and public pressure.

Which NYC boroughs have the most worst landlord watchlist buildings in 2026?

The Bronx dominates the 2026 NYC worst landlord list with the highest concentration of top-25 landlords and the highest per-unit violation rates, particularly in neighborhoods like Highbridge and Mott Haven. Brooklyn ranks second, with significant DOB violations tied to illegal conversions. Upper Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island round out the borough breakdown.

Why doesn’t the NYC worst landlord list include DOB and FDNY violations?

The official watchlist focuses specifically on HPD housing code violations—such as heat failures, lead paint, and pest infestations—per the Public Advocate’s mandate. It does not capture Department of Buildings violations for structural hazards or FDNY fire safety violations, meaning some landlords with dangerous conditions across mixed-use portfolios may not appear on the list at all.

Catch these signals before they become fines

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