The record's stranger findings
Every building in New York leaves a paper trail. Inspectors write violations, tenants call in complaints, deeds change hands, and LLCs get formed to hold one address and nothing else. These stories start from that trail: which landlords take the longest to fix things, which violations only exist because a child lives in the apartment, and who actually owns the building behind the name on the lease. Every number links back to a building or landlord page you can check yourself.
Lead StoryOwnership Forensics
Three Crown Heights buildings sold at a sheriff's auction for just over $900,000 carrying 570 open violations, 387 of them written this year. The violations attach to the building, not the seller, and the new owner owns every one until they are cured.
Worst Landlords
We measured HPD violations written between January 2024 and March 2026 at NYC's 104 largest landlord portfolios, from the day each was issued to the day the owner certified it corrected. Median across 358,428 certified violations: 106 days. Between the fastest and slowest portfolios, the gap runs nearly 3.6 times.
Worst Landlords
Some violations can only exist if a child lives in the apartment. 27,025 of them are open across New York right now, and the median one has been open for 565 days. Here are the ten portfolios holding the most.
Weird But True
This week's Wild NYC Apartment Story: Whitney wrote in about the telescope her family kept by the window, and the 2am look at the building across the street that she did not need twice.
Worst Landlords
The DeMatteis Organization built Battery Park City's first apartments. Three buildings remain in its portfolio — and one address in East New York carries nearly all 6,303 of its open violations.
Worst Landlords
We ranked every NYC landlord portfolio by open violations on the city record. These ten are the worst — and three of them appear on no official watchlist.
Rent Stabilization
Most apartments that stopped being rent-stabilized left for a boring, lawful reason: a tax break expired. Which is why nobody notices the other kind — buildings where tenants say apartments were deregulated when they shouldn't have been, one or two a year, for a decade.
Tenant Rights
I've had four landlords in this city. Two were fine. One took nine months to fix a radiator. One I'm still not sure was the actual owner. Here's the order I read city inspection logs in now.
Data & Policy
We put 3,917,827 complaints from the city's complaint record on a 24-hour dial. Every category keeps its own hour — and the hours say more about how New Yorkers live than the counts ever do. Commercial noise peaks at 10pm. Heat peaks at 9am, which is the strangest number in the whole file.
Tenant Rights
After 14 apartments, I learned that a 20-minute showing can hide a weak shower, a noisy bedroom, dead outlets, and a sofa that can't make it past the elevator.
Weird But True
A rooster in Queens. A wildlife sighting across from the Central Park wall. Bees on Prospect Place, again. Eighty-two illegal-fireworks calls in sixty days. The last three months of New York, in the words of the people who picked up the phone.
Data & Policy
The Mamdani administration just opened bids on a 140-unit affordable project at 2453 2nd Avenue. Within 250 meters: 40 buildings, 75 open HPD violations, 2 in AEP, and 299 rodent 311 calls in the last year.
Data & Policy
NYC issued 255 vacate orders in the last 90 days — one every nine hours. 788 units displaced. 4,419 active orders the city has declared unsafe and never marked fixed. And one Bronx complex has had 19 fire-driven partial unit vacates since 2013.
Weird But True
22 calls about a monkey. 49 about a snake in someone's apartment. 604 about roosters. 93,740 about helicopters. A decade of New York dialing 311 to report things that, somewhere else, would be a hallucination.
Data & Policy
In 2020, New Yorkers filed 5,641 311 complaints about helicopter noise. In 2023, they filed 31,567. Nobody voted on this. The helicopters just got louder, and one borough is bearing almost all of it.
Data & Policy
432 Park Avenue scores in the B range on Brix. Zero open HPD violations, zero open DOB violations. The condo board is suing the developers for $125 million over 1,500 construction defects. Both things are true at the same time — and the gap is the story.
Tenant Rights
Deed theft complaints to the state tripled in two years. The crime is a forged signature, a notary stamp, and a filing nobody verifies. Here are the seven things we look for in the record, and what to do about each one.
Tenant Rights
A New York renter posted a TikTok in 2024 about getting $6,000 back from her landlord. It went viral because almost nobody knew you could do what she did. Here's what happened — and what it means for the million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments.
Ownership Forensics
Mariah Carey has lived at 90 Franklin Street for 26 years. The deed says Franklin Views, LLC. Here is the full chain — every deed, mortgage, and consolidation — in city property filings.
Worst Landlords
Emerald Equity Group's East Harlem portfolio is all over the news. We mapped every building, traced every LLC, and scored every one. 27 of 30 buildings rate concerning. Here's what city inspection records show.
Tenant Rights
NYC's Rental Ripoff Hearings just wrapped. Tenants showed up in five boroughs with stories of chatbot supers, three-year leaks, and profiteer landlords. Here's what city inspection records show — and how to find yours.
Worst Landlords
On day 16 of his administration, Mayor Mamdani announced a $2.1M settlement with A&E Real Estate covering 14 buildings. We pulled every building through Brix — violations, ownership chains, court orders, all of it.
Tenant Rights
All five Rental Ripoff hearings have wrapped, but written testimony is still open until the policy report drops in early July. Here's how to show up with the receipts.
Worst Landlords
The Public Advocate's watchlist ranks landlords one way. We ranked every portfolio in the city by open violations instead — and the two lists don't agree. Here are the biggest, and who the city missed.
Tenant Rights
I've rented five apartments in this city and only found out one of them was stabilized after I moved out. Nobody tells you. Here are the seven checks I run now, in the order I run them.
Worst Landlords
Pinnacle Group defaulted on its loans and declared bankruptcy after amassing 5,000+ housing code violations. The buildings sold for $451 million — to a buyer with family ties to Pinnacle's CEO.
Worst Landlords
The largest settlement in HPD Anti-Harassment Unit history covers 14 buildings. A&E manages roughly 180. We pulled the full portfolio through Brix — here's what tenants are still dealing with.
Lines pulled straight from NYC housing files. Nothing embellished.