A 311 complaint is not a violation.
The agencies: the flow, HPD, DOB, OATH/ECB, 311
Of the 460,596 New York City properties with a 311 service request since August 5, 2025, 119,032 also have an HPD housing violation, 25.8%. The rest had a 311 complaint and no HPD violation.
See what is open on one building.
What 311 is
311 is the city's non-emergency request line, not an agency of its own. A call opens a service request that gets routed to whichever agency actually handles that kind of issue: HPD for a housing condition, DOB for a construction concern, and plenty of other agencies for everything from noise to illegal parking. Our own copy of the 311 dataset holds every agency's requests over a trailing window, 3,953,873 requests from August 5, 2025 to September 27, 2026, across 460,596 distinct properties.
What has to happen before a call becomes a violation
A 311 call, on its own, is only a request. For an HPD housing violation to result, HPD has to receive the case, schedule an inspection, and have an inspector confirm a Housing Maintenance Code condition on site. Any of those steps can end the case with no violation issued: the request can belong to another agency entirely, the inspection can find nothing to cite, or the unit can be inaccessible when the inspector arrives. How a confirmed violation moves through HPD from there is on its own page.
The overlap, both directions
The two datasets can be joined on the city's own BBL parcel identifier, and the overlap is asymmetric depending on which side supplies the denominator.
| Direction | Base | Also carries the other | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 311 properties that also carry an HPD violation | 460,596 | 119,032 | 25.8% |
| HPD-violation properties that also carry a recent 311 request | 158,420 | 119,032 | 75.1% |
The 311 window is trailing (August 5, 2025 onward); the HPD side is our full copy over its three-year window. The two rows are not the same fraction of the same group.
Why the gap cuts both ways
The gap in the first row is mostly volume that was never headed to HPD: most 311 traffic citywide belongs to other agencies, and a fair share of what does reach HPD is inspected and closed with no condition confirmed. The gap in the second row runs the other way. Most properties with an HPD violation have generated a 311 request in just the last thirteen months, which tracks with how HPD violations work: a building rarely carries one violation in isolation, and an active property tends to keep generating calls.
Which agency actually answers
311 is a switchboard, not a single department. Noise and illegal parking route to NYPD, sanitation and dirty conditions route to DSNY, housing conditions route to HPD, and construction and permit concerns route to DOB. We do not hold which agency handled each call in our own copy of the data, only the property and the date, so the 25.8% overlap figure above is the closest this data can get to how much 311 volume is actually housing-related.
Why the window is trailing, not all-time
Unlike HPD's violations, which we hold back to August 7, 2023, our copy of 311 is a rolling window refreshed on the same weekly cadence as the rest of this site, currently August 5, 2025 through September 27, 2026. 311 volume is large enough citywide that holding it all-time would not change the overlap figures much, but it would cost real storage for rows this site never reads past that window.
For a specific address
This page answers a citywide question, not an address-level one. A specific 311 service request, its status, and which agency it was routed to are all public on NYC's own 311 service request search, the place to look up any one call. The service request number the call produced is the fastest way in.
What this page is not
This page counts requests and violations in aggregate. It does not identify a building, a caller, or a specific complaint, and a 311 service request is not itself evidence of a housing condition. The full agency-to-agency flow, from a call to a hearing, is on the agencies hub.
No building or owner is named on this page. Source: NYC Open Data, the city's own published datasets. Status codes decoded, violations by borough, citywide, ViolationScout.