Editorial policy
What we publish, what we leave out, and what happens when you write in.
Every figure on this site traces back to a record New York City already made public: an HPD violation, a DOB permit or violation, an OATH hearing. We copy it, date it, and link to where we got it. This page states the boundary plainly, before we name a single building by address.
Why this page exists now.
We're building a page for the Queens buildings with enough on the record to say something useful: twenty or more violations, across four or more different statuses, spanning at least two years. That comes to roughly 2,500 buildings. A building with one or two violations has a record too, and you can look it up here, but we don't publish a page for it. A citywide count from three weeks ago is still roughly right; that's what an aggregate page is for. A page naming one address and its open Class C violation doesn't age the same way. If that violation cleared last week and our page still shows it open, that's a false statement about a specific property, made in public. It can cost that owner a sale. Everything below is the standard those pages are held to before the first one goes live.
What's on the record.
A violation, its class, the date it was issued, and whether it's still open. A building's address and its BBL. A count of open items against it. Nothing here is estimated or modeled: every number is a live query against our own copy of the same HPD, DOB, and OATH data the city itself publishes. It runs at the moment the page is built, and that date prints right next to the number it produced.
What never appears.
No apartment numbers. No tenant names. No individual owner's name, home address, or phone number, ever. A corporation or an LLC may appear on a building's page if the city's own filing lists it as the owner of record. That's the organization the record names, not a person we found. A street and a building are places, and we'll name them. A person is a person, and we won't, no matter whose name is on the deed.
You want your building's page taken down. Here's why it won't be.
The violation on that page didn't start with us. HPD or DOB opened it, dated it, and published it before ViolationScout existed. We didn't write it. We copied it. Deleting our copy wouldn't delete the city's record, and it wouldn't change what a tenant, a lender, or a buyer's attorney finds three clicks later on HPD Online. It would only make our copy wrong.
So we don't take down an accurate record because someone asked. If we did, the next person who searched that address would get a page that's silent about a real, open, hazardous condition, and silence is worse than the number. The entire reason this site exists is that the record stays honest even on the day someone would rather it didn't.
What we will fix, and how fast.
A wrong address. A wrong BBL. A violation the city itself has since marked corrected or dismissed and our copy hasn't caught up on yet. Two buildings collapsed into one page. Those are our errors, and we fix them because they're wrong, not because someone asked nicely.
Email hello@violationscout.com with the address and what looks off. We read every request within one business day. If a correction is warranted, it ships with our next nightly data refresh. That refresh runs at 4:30 each morning, and the underlying city data already trails the city's own systems by about three days. So the honest number is the next business day after that refresh, not the same day.
Check it yourself, without asking us.
No account, no cost, and it's the same record we read:
HPD Online
Housing maintenance violations, by address, free. hpdonline.nyc.gov.
DOB BIS
Construction, permit, and equipment matters. a810-bisweb.nyc.gov.
If we disagree
The city's site wins. Ours is a dated copy; theirs is the original record.
What this isn't.
Not legal advice, and nothing on this site is. We don't represent owners, file paperwork, or talk to HPD or DOB on anyone's behalf. Certifying a repair and clearing a violation happens through the agency's own process, never through us. If you want one firm to handle that filing, /for-owners has a consent-based way to request exactly one introduction. We don't start that without you asking first, and we never will.
Questions, corrections, or a page that's wrong: hello@violationscout.com.