Which NYC Neighborhoods Have the Most HPD Violations?

Belmont in the Bronx carries the highest HPD violation rate of any New York City neighborhood we measure, at 125.9 Housing Maintenance Code violations per 100 apartments against a citywide 30.1. The metric is violations per 100 apartments in buildings with three or more units, because a raw violation count ranks neighborhoods by how many apartments they hold rather than by how bad conditions are inside them.

The figures below are ours, generated on September 22, 2026 for 128 New York City locations. They cover one 12 month window, they count violations and nothing else, and they carry a limit worth stating at the top: 45.3% of buildings in the measured apartment stock picked up no violations at all in that window, so a neighborhood average describes a distribution, not an address.

Method and Data Window

Every rate here comes from our own NYC housing data, built from three city sources. Violations are HPD Housing Maintenance Code violations with an inspection date from September 22, 2025 to September 22, 2026, joined on borough, block and lot to tax lots holding three or more apartments, with each lot placed in a 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Area by its coordinates.

The denominator is apartments, not buildings. Neighborhood names follow the 2020 tabulation areas, so several of them combine places a renter would name on their own, and areas under 200 apartments are left out.

Two apartment universes appear on this page and they do not substitute for each other. The city tax lot file, retrieved on September 26, 2026, holds 2,868,881 apartments in 172,485 lots with three or more apartments: Manhattan 950,480, Brooklyn 840,081, Queens 531,929, the Bronx 508,277 and Staten Island 38,114. The rates in the tables come from our generated file, which reaches only the lots it could place inside a neighborhood boundary, so it covers a little less than that stock. Raw violation counts from Open Data cover every building in the city, including one and two family homes. Dividing one of those counts by one of these stocks will not reproduce a table rate.

For scale, we ran the citywide count ourselves on September 26, 2026. HPD inspectors wrote 936,572 Housing Maintenance Code violations with an inspection date inside that 12 month window, 275,351 of them Class C, spread across 125,933 distinct building records. That total includes small one and two family homes, which our neighborhood rates exclude.

One caution about any count like that. HPD keeps adding records for weeks after an inspection, so a count for a fixed past window rises every time you run it. The previous 12 months, September 22, 2024 to September 22, 2025, read 918,685 on the same day, which puts the newer window 1.9% higher for now. The newer window has more filling left to do, so treat that gap as a floor rather than a finding.

Neighborhoods With the Highest Violation Rates

Twelve neighborhoods lead the list. Six sit in the Bronx and three in Brooklyn. Queens has none in the top twelve, and the two Staten Island entries are the surprise, since they carry high rates and clean records at the same time.

Belmont's 125.9 runs more than four times the citywide rate, and its 823 buildings hold 12,530 apartments, so this is not one tower distorting a small base. Highbridge, Tremont and the Fordham area follow the same pattern: a high rate paired with a small share of clean buildings.

Anyone who has read a violation map built on raw counts will recognize most of these names, because the Bronx and central Brooklyn lead both kinds of ranking. Switching to a per-apartment rate changes two things. Small Staten Island areas climb into the top twelve, and large neighborhoods with heavy apartment counts and light violation loads drop out of it.

The Class C Share Within Each Rate

Class C means immediately hazardous, and the class HPD assigns sets the correction clock. The owner gets 24 hours for most Class C conditions, 21 days for lead paint, window guards, mold and pests, 14 days for self-closing doors, and no grace period at all on heat and hot water. A mold violation may require professional mold remediation as well as correction of its moisture source. Class B allows 30 days and Class A allows 90.

Citywide, 9.2 of the 30.1 violations per 100 apartments are Class C, which is 31% of the total. Belmont's Class C rate of 42.4 per 100 works out to 34% of its violations, Highbridge to 36% and the Fordham area to 35%. The share holds near a third as the rate climbs, so the higher total does not come with a sharply higher Class C share. The citywide Class C categories help explain what can sit behind that share.

The low end breaks that pattern. Co-op City puts 13% of its violations in Class C and the Tribeca area 16%, well under the citywide 31%. The lower Class C share tells you that serious violations form a smaller part of those areas' total; it does not identify which other conditions make up the difference.

Correction clocks matter to the reading of any of these numbers. Of the 275,351 Class C violations inspected in the 12 month window, 127,574 were still open when we counted on September 26, 2026, which is 46.3%. A violation appearing in a rate is not a violation that somebody fixed.

Neighborhoods With the Lowest Violation Rates

The bottom of the list is Manhattan, with two exceptions. Rates here run from 1.3 to 4.4 per 100 apartments, against 125.9 at the top.

Long Island City and Co-op City are the two entries outside Manhattan, and this list is not ours alone. The same names fill the quiet end of the city on 311 housing complaints per 1,000 apartments: the Financial District and Battery Park City, Long Island City, Turtle Bay, Lenox Hill, Murray Hill and Kips Bay, Tribeca and Co-op City all sit near the bottom of both measures.

The agreement is worth more than either list on its own. One measure counts what tenants report and the other counts what inspectors write, and they land on the same neighborhoods, which makes a reporting-only explanation less persuasive, although neither measure captures every condition. What this table adds is its fourth column. A low rate does not guarantee a high share of clean buildings, and Co-op City is the proof at 4.0 per 100 with 23.5% of its buildings clean, because its apartments sit in a handful of very large buildings.

Borough Rates Side by Side

Borough rates use the same measure and the same window, and the two right-hand columns disagree in a useful way. Staten Island ranks second on rate and second best on clean buildings at 59.8%, while the Bronx is worst on both. A borough can carry its violations in a minority of its buildings or across most of them, and the rate on its own does not say which. Staten Island also rests on the thinnest base of the five.

Raw counts tell a different story, and that difference is the argument for using a rate. Our own borough query for the same window, run on September 26, 2026, returned 320,230 violations in Brooklyn against 314,391 in the Bronx. Brooklyn wrote more violations and still sits 24.9 points below the Bronx on rate, because Brooklyn holds 840,081 apartments in lots with three or more apartments against the Bronx's 508,277. Those counts and those stocks come from different filters, so read each as its own measure rather than dividing one into the other.

The Class C split by borough is sharper than the overall split. The Bronx took 102,484 of the window's Class C violations, Brooklyn 85,533, Manhattan 50,693, Queens 32,434 and Staten Island 4,207. Staten Island has the second highest rate in the city and the smallest absolute load of serious violations anywhere.

Buildings With No Violations at All

Rankings leave out the number a renter needs most. Across the city, 45.3% of buildings with three or more apartments picked up no HPD violation in the 12 months, and whether a clean record means a well run building depends on how often anyone inspected it.

The spread on that share is wide. Marine Park leads at 83.5% of buildings clean on a rate of 16.3. Norwood in the Bronx sits at the other end with 18.6% clean on a rate of 61.0. By borough, 30.7% of Bronx buildings came through clean against 55.9% in Queens.

Across the 112 distinct footprints in our file, five of which are borough totals, the violation rate and the clean share correlate at minus 0.65 on a Pearson measure. They move against each other, with enough slack that several neighborhoods sit far off the line.

Building Age and the Violation Rate

Age explains less about the violation rate at neighborhood level than the pre-war reputation suggests. Across the same 112 footprints, median year built and the rate correlate at minus 0.03 on a Pearson measure, and the pre-war share of apartments at plus 0.39. The Tribeca area carries one of the oldest medians in our file, 1896, on a rate of 4.4. The construction date carries more signal one building at a time, which is the level at which we measured pre-war stock against newer construction.

Limits of a Neighborhood Ranking

Rosebank is the case that complicates everything above. It holds the second highest rate in the city at 98.6 per 100 apartments, and 65.0% of its buildings picked up no violations at all, a cleaner share than the citywide 45.3%. A small group of buildings with heavy violation loads carries that rate, and most of the neighborhood sits outside it. Port Richmond runs the same way at 65.7 per 100 with 59.2% of buildings clean, and Jackson Heights sits above the city rate at 31.5 with 62.9% clean.

The city's own worst-buildings list argues the same point. On February 9, 2026 HPD named 250 buildings for the 19th round of its Alternative Enforcement Program, covering 7,038 homes and 54,909 open housing code violations, which brings closer monitoring, more frequent inspections and city repairs billed to the owner. We mapped that round ourselves: those 250 addresses spread across 85 different neighborhood tabulation areas, and no single area holds more than nine of them.

The borough split on that list is the part worth keeping. The Bronx holds 105 of the 250 and Brooklyn 72, which matches the rates. Manhattan holds 45 and Queens 28, and those are the two lowest-rate boroughs in the city. Even in lower-rate boroughs, the AEP list contains distressed buildings. The building's own record matters more than the borough or neighborhood average.

A neighborhood average tells you nothing about a specific address. Two buildings on the same block can sit on opposite sides of every figure on this page, and the rate above is an average over hundreds or thousands of them. Put the address into the building lookup and you get that building's own HPD violations by class and status, complaints, registration and legal actions, its DOB violations, complaints and permits, executed evictions, rodent inspections, rent stabilization status and 311 complaints near it. No login, and no charge.

If the records show open violations at your own address and the owner will not act, an HP action in housing court is how a tenant forces repairs, on a $45 filing fee with a waiver available.

Frequently Asked Questions

These come from the questions people search alongside the head term, and the answers use the same window and the same measure as the tables.

Which NYC borough has the most HPD violations?

It depends on the measure. By rate the Bronx leads at 59.9 violations per 100 apartments, close to double the citywide 30.1. By raw count Brooklyn leads: in the 12 months to September 22, 2026, counted on September 26, Brooklyn held 320,230 violations against the Bronx's 314,391. Brooklyn has far more apartments in the tax lot file. The raw counts include buildings outside the rate's measured apartment stock, so do not divide those counts by the table's denominator.

How many HPD violations is too many for one building?

No law sets a threshold. Compare the building against the citywide rate of 30.1 violations per 100 apartments and against its own neighborhood, then look at the open Class C count and how old those records are. Given that 45.3% of buildings picked up none in a year, an open Class C deserves a closer look at its condition and correction status.

Does a high-violation neighborhood mean the building I am looking at is bad?

No. The share of buildings that picked up no violation at all runs from 18.6% in Norwood to 83.5% in Marine Park, so the hardest neighborhoods still hold clean buildings and the easiest ones still hold bad buildings. A neighborhood figure tells you how hard to look and which questions to put to the managing agent. The building's own record answers them.

Do older buildings have more HPD violations?

Not at neighborhood level. Median year built and the violation rate correlate at minus 0.03 across the 112 footprints we measure, which is nothing. The pre-war share of apartments correlates at plus 0.39 on the same basis, so pre-war stock carries some signal without settling the question. The Tribeca area holds one of the oldest medians in the file, 1896, and one of the lowest rates in the city at 4.4.

What is the Alternative Enforcement Program?

It is HPD's escalation route for the buildings with the worst violation records. On February 9, 2026 the city named 250 buildings for the 19th round, holding 7,038 homes and 54,909 open housing code violations between them. Buildings in the program get more frequent inspections and Orders to Correct, and the city can carry out repairs itself and bill the owner for the work.

How do I check HPD violations by address?

Type the address into a free lookup and read the building's own record rather than its neighborhood's. Look at three things: the count of open Class C violations, the dates on them, and whether the same condition keeps coming back. HPD publishes the underlying data on NYC Open Data, and its own building search covers registration and violation history for anyone who wants the raw source.