Five separate agencies keep records on NYC buildings: HPD (housing conditions), DOB (structure and construction), FDNY (fire safety), DOHMH (health, including rodents), and ECB/OATH (where violations get judged). None of their systems talk to each other. Here's who does what.
Your building doesn't have one file. It has five, kept by five agencies that don't coordinate, don't cross-reference, and don't particularly care that you'd have to visit all of them to get the whole story. Here's the alphabet, decoded.
HPD, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The inside-your-apartment agency: heat, hot water, mold, pests, leaks, lead paint. When an inspector confirms a problem, it becomes a violation with a class (A, B, or C) and a legal repair deadline from 90 days down to 24 hours. HPD is the loudest file by volume: over 1.8 million violations and nearly as many tenant complaints sit in its records from the last two years alone.
DOB, the Department of Buildings. The building's bones: structure, construction, permits, elevators, boilers, facades. DOB issues its own violations, halts unsafe work with stop work orders, and empties unsafe buildings with vacate orders. Its records are split across two systems that came out roughly a Windows-98 apart, and the same building can have history in both.
FDNY, the Fire Department. Sprinklers, fire escapes, and the vacate orders nobody wants: when FDNY empties a building, it's because staying inside could be lethal. Rare (a few hundred on file citywide), which is exactly why a building that has one deserves your full attention.
DOHMH, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The agency you didn't know was inspecting your building. Rodent inspections run to hundreds of thousands, with results like "failed for rat activity" written in the city's own deadpan, plus lead, asbestos, and cooling towers. If your future building lost a fight with the rat index, DOHMH wrote it down.
ECB/OATH. Not an inspector – a courtroom. Violations from the other agencies get adjudicated here, fines get assessed, and sometimes paid. Think of it as where the paperwork goes to argue.
311. The intake desk. Your complaint call gets routed to whichever agency owns the problem, and lands on the building's public record either way.
Here's why the split matters. Take one Bronx building we pulled this week: 1,853 HPD violations, 94 housing-court cases, 50 eviction filings, 20 rodent inspections, and exactly zero DOB complaints. Check only DOB and it looks spotless. Five files, one building, and the clean one is lying by omission.
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