What we publish, what we leave out, and what happens when you write in.
Every figure on this site traces back to something 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 history 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 can still be looked 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 a page shows.
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 counted from our own copy of the same HPD, DOB, and OATH data the city itself publishes. The count runs at the moment the page is built, and the top of the page says what date that data runs through.
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. That's the company the filing names, not a person we went looking for. 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 page 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 whole reason this site exists is that it 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, we make it, and it appears the next time this site publishes. Every page prints, at the top, the date its data runs through, so you can check whether the correction has landed rather than take our word for it. The underlying city data already trails the city’s own systems by about three days, so the honest answer is that a correction is visible on the next publish, not the same day.
Check it yourself, without asking us.
No account, no cost, and it's the same data 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.
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.
From the maker of PulseCities.