Agencies: DOB

What DOB governs, and where its violations get heard.

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

What DOB governs

DOB, the Department of Buildings, governs the physical structure: permits, plan approval, elevators, boilers, cranes and derricks, sidewalk sheds, and whether construction underway matches what was actually filed. That is a different code from the Housing Maintenance Code HPD enforces inside occupied units, and a different trigger. DOB does not need a 311 call the way an HPD housing inspection usually does; its own inspectors and plan examiners can write a violation directly when work proceeds without a permit or against an approved plan.

We do not hold a standalone DOB violations table. DOB's enforcement record reaches this site through the ECB docket, the city's DOB ECB Violations dataset, which is DOB's own notices once they are queued for a hearing. How that hearing works is on its own page.

What kind of matter it is

Every DOB/OATH matter on the record carries a type. Construction dominates, and elevators and boilers, both mechanical systems DOB inspects on a fixed cycle, are the next largest categories.

Work without a permit

Within the construction category, 24,158 matters cite work performed without a permit at all, 20.2% of construction violations and 14.6% of every DOB/OATH matter on the record. It is one of DOB's most direct violations: no filing exists for the work being done, so the question at a hearing is not whether the work matched a plan but whether a plan existed at all.

Where DOB and HPD meet

55,401 properties have ever carried a DOB/OATH matter, and 24,825 of those, 44.8%, also carry an HPD violation somewhere on the record. The two agencies enforce different codes on the same physical building, so a property under active construction can carry a DOB stop-work matter and a housing-code violation at the same time, from two different inspections with two different case files. The full flow across all four sources is on the agencies hub.

Elevators and boilers, on a fixed cycle

Construction violations follow active work, but 11,228 elevator matters and 5,016 boiler matters follow a different pattern: DOB inspects both on a recurring schedule whether or not any construction is underway, so a building with no active permit can still generate a violation the moment an inspection finds a device out of code.

Why the record calls this ECB, not DOB

The city publishes DOB's enforcement activity as the DOB ECB Violations dataset, named for the venue rather than the issuing agency, which is exactly the naming confusion this hub exists to untangle. DOB writes the notice and appears as the petitioner on the docket; ECB is where the notice gets tested. Of the 165,249 matters DOB has brought, 80,904 are still active on the docket, 49.0%, and the rest have resolved one way or another. What happens once a matter reaches a hearing, including how often nobody shows up, is on the OATH/ECB page.

Checking a specific building

This page counts matters in aggregate, sorted by type, never by address. DOB's own Building Information System is the authoritative source for a filed permit, an active violation, or a scheduled inspection at a specific building, and it is the record to check before relying on anything summarized here, including for a building mid-construction where the permit status changes week to week.

What this page is not

This page counts DOB/OATH matters by type. It does not identify a building, an owner, or a specific permit, and it is not a substitute for DOB's own Building Information System, the authoritative source for a filed permit or an active violation at a specific address.

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