What Do NYC DOB Violation Records Show About Repeat Construction Sites?
They show that the same properties keep appearing year after year, while the heaviest-cited buildings account for only a small slice of the city's total.
- 85 of the 200 most-cited properties received summonses in all five years studied
- Those 200 properties accounted for just 3.5% of 286,468 citywide summonses
- Construction violations at the two most serious severity levels made up 72.2% of the total
These are enforcement records rather than accident records, and the distinction matters.
We pulled five complete calendar years of NYC DOB violations data to answer a question that comes up constantly in construction accident lawyers' work: do unsafe conditions cluster at a handful of notorious buildings, or are they spread across the city? The answer turned out to be both, in a way that is more interesting than a worst-buildings list.
The Perecman Firm PLLC has recovered nearly a billion dollars for injured New Yorkers, and understanding how enforcement records actually behave is part of how these cases get built.
Key Takeaways about DOB Violation Records
- Across 2021 through 2025, New York City recorded 286,468 ECB and OATH summonses issued by the Department of Buildings.
- The 200 most-cited properties generated 10,006 of those summonses, or roughly 3.5% of the citywide total.
- Among those 200 properties, 85 appeared in every one of the five years, and 133 appeared in at least four.
- Citywide volume fell sharply through 2023 and has risen in each of the two years since.
- Construction Class 1 and Class 2 summonses accounted for 72.2% of all records, meaning the totals are driven by serious categories rather than minor ones.
- About 27.9% of the five-year summonses were still listed as active at the time of the pull.
How We Analyzed the NYC Department of Buildings (DOB) Data
We worked from two public datasets published by the City of New York: the DOB ECB Violations file, which contains summonses issued by the Department of Buildings and adjudicated through OATH, and the DOB NOW Approved Permits file, which carries permit applicant and owner fields.
Records were counted by distinct violation number and grouped by Building Identification Number, the BIN that DOB assigns to each structure. We limited the study to the five complete calendar years from January 1, 2021, through December 31, 2025, so that partial-year effects would not distort the annual comparisons. Two DOB placeholder BINs were excluded from the property rankings.
Entity names were normalized by uppercasing and stripping punctuation and common business suffixes. We did not use fuzzy matching, so similarly spelled names that remained different were not merged. That is a deliberately conservative choice, and it means some entities are undercounted rather than overcounted.
One limitation shapes everything that follows: there is no join available between a specific permit job number and a specific summons. Any connection between a property and a listed owner or contractor is an association at the building level, not proof that the party was responsible for a given violation.
Are Repeat Violations Concentrated in a Few Buildings?
No, and this was the most surprising result. The 200 most-cited properties in the city produced 10,006 summonses out of 286,468 citywide, which is about 3.5% of the total.
That number reframes the question. A list of the city's worst buildings, however dramatic, explains almost none of the enforcement activity in New York. The vast majority of summonses were issued across a long tail of properties, each receiving a handful.
Even the single most-cited property in the dataset, which recorded 279 summonses over the five years, represents roughly one-tenth of one percent of the citywide total. It stands out sharply against its peers, at about 1.8 times the second-ranked property's 158, and it is still a rounding error against the city as a whole.
How Long Do Problem Properties Stay in the System?
They stay for years, which is the finding with the most practical weight. Of the 200 most-cited properties, 85 received summonses in all five calendar years, and 133 received them in at least four. The median property on that list was active in four of the five years.
That pattern rules out the simplest explanation. If high-frequency properties were just large projects generating a burst of paperwork during a single busy construction season, they would appear in one year or two and then drop off. Most of them did not.
Persistence is distinct from volume, and it is the more meaningful signal in a dataset like this one. A property that draws citations across five separate years has been through multiple inspection cycles, multiple opportunities to correct conditions, and, in many cases, multiple contractors.
The annual rankings make the same point from another angle. Comparing the top 20 properties in each individual year, the lists turn over substantially, and several properties that led one year barely register in the next. Yet the five-year list is dominated by properties that never left.
Those two facts sit together comfortably once you separate the two kinds of property. Some generate a large number of citations during a single intensive project and then disappear from the data. Others accumulate a steady handful every year without ever topping a list.
The second group is the one worth paying attention to, and it is invisible in any ranking built on a single year of records. It only appears when the window is wide enough to show recurrence.
What Kinds of Violations Drive the Totals?
Serious construction categories dominate. DOB sorts summonses by type and by severity class, and the two heaviest construction classes together accounted for nearly three-quarters of every record in the five-year file.
| Violation type and severity | Summonses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Construction, Class 2 | 118,171 | 41.3% |
| Construction, Class 1 | 88,609 | 30.9% |
| Unknown, Class 2 | 13,416 | 4.7% |
| Elevators, Class 1 | 10,887 | 3.8% |
| Unknown, Class 1 | 9,848 | 3.4% |
| Boilers, Class 2 | 9,160 | 3.2% |
| Elevators, Class 2 | 8,730 | 3.0% |
| Construction, Class 3 | 7,198 | 2.5% |
| Site Safety, Class 1 | 2,387 | 0.8% |
Construction Class 1 and Class 2 combined reach 206,780 summonses, or 72.2% of the file. The lowest construction severity tier, Class 3, accounts for only 2.5%, so these totals are not being inflated by minor paperwork infractions.
Did Enforcement Rise or Fall Over the Five Years?
It fell steeply, then reversed. Citywide summonses dropped by more than a third in 2022 and fell again in 2023, before climbing in each of the two most recent years.
| Year | Summonses | Properties cited | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 80,418 | 26,867 | |
| 2022 | 52,523 | 22,728 | -34.7% |
| 2023 | 43,860 | 20,095 | -16.5% |
| 2024 | 51,933 | 26,418 | +18.4% |
| 2025 | 57,734 | 26,232 | +11.2% |
The 2021 figure deserves caution rather than a headline. Enforcement practices, post-pandemic construction activity, and record-entry timing can all affect a number like that, and none of them can be separated out using this dataset alone. The more defensible reading is the recent direction: citations have risen two years running while remaining below where they started.
How the Boroughs Compare
Brooklyn produced the most summonses of any borough over the five years. The Bronx produced the most per property in a given year, which is a different measure telling a different story.
| Borough | Five-year summonses | Property-years | Per property-year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brooklyn | 98,381 | 42,034 | 2.34 |
| Manhattan | 65,290 | 27,158 | 2.40 |
| Queens | 63,337 | 28,573 | 2.22 |
| Bronx | 49,320 | 19,428 | 2.54 |
| Staten Island | 10,140 | 5,172 | 1.96 |
Those per-property-year figures describe how concentrated citations were among buildings that got cited at all. They are not adjusted for population, building stock, or construction volume, and they should not be read as a violation rate for the borough.
What This Data Does Not Show
Being direct about the limits is what makes the rest of it usable. Several things cannot be concluded from these records, and we want to name them plainly.
- These are not accident records. A summons documents a cited condition, not an injury. Nothing here counts or measures construction accidents.
- A violation total does not establish a building's current condition. About 27.9% of the five-year summonses remained active at the time of the pull, while 72.1% showed as resolved, and the field does not capture how long the resolution took.
- A permit-listed owner may not be the current owner. Those names come from permits issued during the period, not from a title search.
- A contractor listed on a permit is not necessarily the party cited. Firms that focus on scaffolding and facade work are frequently hired precisely to correct an unsafe condition, so recurrence in permit records can indicate remediation rather than fault.
- Association is not causation. Because no job-number-to-summons join exists, every owner-to-contractor connection in this analysis is a building-level association.
We would rather publish a narrower finding that holds up than a broader one that does not.
Why an OSHA Citation Is Not an Industrial Code Violation
This distinction gets blurred constantly, including by people who should know better, and getting it wrong can weaken a legitimate claim. DOB summonses and OSHA citations come from two entirely separate enforcement systems.
OSHA is federal. Its citations can be strong evidence that a dangerous condition existed and that an inspector documented it. What an OSHA citation is not is a violation of the New York State Industrial Code.
That matters because a claim under Labor Law section 241(6) has to be anchored to a specific, concrete provision of the Industrial Code, the construction safety rules maintained by the New York State Department of Labor. A federal citation cannot serve as the predicate, nor can a DOB summons. Enforcement records are useful evidence in a case. They are not a substitute for the statutory element.
FAQs about NYC DOB Violations and Construction Accidents
These questions come up when people look at enforcement records for the first time.
Does a building with many violations mean it is dangerous today?
Not necessarily. Summons counts are a historical record of cited conditions, and a substantial share of them show as resolved. Assessing a building's present condition requires looking at status, disposition, and timing rather than a raw total.
Can I look up violations at a specific address?
Yes. The city publishes this information through DOB's violations guidance and through the open data portal, searchable by address or BIN.
What is the difference between a DOB violation and an ECB summons?
Broadly, DOB issues civil penalties directly, while summonses issued by DOB and adjudicated through OATH and the Environmental Control Board sit in a separate dataset. This analysis used the ECB and OATH summons records.
What do Class 1, 2, and 3 mean?
They are DOB severity tiers, with Class 1 covering the most serious conditions and Class 3 the least. In this five-year file, the two most serious construction tiers accounted for the vast majority of records.
Does a violation at a site help an injured worker's case?
It can serve as evidence that a hazardous condition existed and was documented by an inspector. Whether it supports a particular legal claim depends on which statute applies and what the specific record says.
Why did citywide numbers drop so much after 2021?
This dataset cannot answer that. Enforcement staffing, construction activity, and record timing are all plausible contributors, and separating them would require information that the file does not contain.
Can this data identify which companies are responsible?
Not reliably. The respondent named on a summons is the most direct link available, while owner and contractor names drawn from permits are building-level associations only.
Talk With Us About a Construction Site Injury
Enforcement records are one piece of how a construction case gets investigated, alongside site logs, permits, witness accounts, and the physical evidence that disappears within days of an accident.
Injured on the job in NYC, Queens, or Long Island? The Perecman Firm PLLC handles serious work accident cases. Call (212) 977-7033 or contact us online to discuss your case.
Steven Dorfman
Managing Legal Officer
Steven Dorfman is the managing attorney at The Perecman Firm, where he brings more than twenty years of experience as a trial lawyer handling catastrophic injury cases. He has represented hundreds of seriously injured clients, most of them construction workers, and has worked on cases including the 2008 Manhattan Crane Collapse and the 2013 Spuyten Duyvil train derailment.
Author's Bio