The agencies, in one place

How HPD, DOB, and OATH/ECB fit together.

The agencies: the flow · HPD · DOB · OATH/ECB · 311

The flow, in order

Most cases on this site start the same way. A tenant calls 311. The call itself is a request for the city to look at something, not a finding of anything. It is answered by whichever agency actually handles that kind of complaint, and most 311 volume is not housing-related at all.

1. HPD, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, schedules an inspection once a housing complaint reaches it. Only if an inspector confirms a Housing Maintenance Code condition does HPD issue a violation and mail the owner a Notice of Violation.
2. From that point the case is public: searchable on HPD Online, and part of the record this site reads. The owner is expected to correct the condition and certify the correction with HPD.
3. Separately, and often on the same building, DOB, the Department of Buildings, governs the physical work: permits, plan approval, elevators, boilers, cranes, and whether construction underway matches what was filed. DOB's own inspectors and plan examiners can issue a violation directly, with no 311 call involved at all.
4. When DOB, or another city agency, wants to prosecute a violation it has issued, the matter goes to a hearing. That hearing is OATH, sitting as ECB, and it is where a respondent can contest the notice and a judge enters a finding.

If the certify-by date on an HPD violation passes with nothing filed, the status moves to Not Complied With, tracked with every other status in the status glossary.

What OATH/ECB is not

The single most common mix-up in this category is treating OATH/ECB as a third or fourth enforcement agency alongside HPD and DOB. It is not. OATH, the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, does not send inspectors and does not decide what counts as a violation. Sitting as ECB, the Environmental Control Board, it is the venue: the room where the agency that already wrote the notice has to prove it, and where a penalty gets set once the hearing concludes. The full explanation, with the hearing outcomes on the record, is on its own page.

A building can carry no OATH/ECB history at all and still have an open HPD violation. A building can also carry an OATH/ECB judgment with nothing on HPD's own record, because the matter that reached the hearing came from DOB, not HPD. The two facts are independent, and reading only one of them is reading part of the file.

Four windows into one record

HPD and 311 rows are our full working copy of each city dataset. The DOB row reads the city's DOB ECB Violations dataset: DOB's own violations heard at OATH, not every agency OATH hears.

Where the two records actually overlap

Right now, 99,216 properties carry an open HPD violation and 32,811 carry an active OATH/ECB matter. 12,355 properties carry both at once: 12.5% of the open-HPD group, and 37.7% of the active-OATH/ECB group. Widen the window to every record ever filed, not only what is open today, and 158,057 properties have ever carried an HPD violation, 55,401 have ever carried a DOB matter, and 24,825 have carried both, 15.7%.

Counted by BBL, the city's own parcel identifier, never by owner or building name. A property counts once per row regardless of how many violations it carries.

311, and why a complaint is not a violation

311 sits upstream of everything above. Calling 311 opens a service request; it does not, by itself, put anything on a violation record. Our own copy of 311 carries every agency's service requests, not only housing ones, so most of that volume is never headed to HPD at all. Only 25.8% of the 461,020 properties carrying a 311 request in our trailing window also carry an HPD violation on file. The full breakdown, including the reverse direction, is on its own page.

Why the distinction pays off

A building can read clean on HPD's record and still owe real money to the city through an OATH/ECB judgment that started with a DOB notice, work without a permit or a sidewalk shed out of code, that never touched the housing code at all. The two records answer different questions. HPD tracks conditions inside occupied units. DOB tracks the physical building and the work being done to it. OATH/ECB tracks whether either agency's notice held up once a respondent had the chance to contest it. Checking only one of the three is checking a third of the file.

Aggregates only; no building or owner is named on this page. Sources: NYC Open Data, cited not linked. How to check your own building, status codes decoded, the record by borough, citywide, ViolationScout.