In early 2026, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development published its 2026 Certification Watchlist. The list names 100 buildings whose owners HPD identified as having filed approximately 7,500 false certifications during 2025 — certifications claiming that some 20,000 hazardous housing-code violations had been corrected when, on re-inspection, they had not been.
The watchlist is the first of its kind released at this scale by the agency. It represents a quantification of a phenomenon that tenant advocates have described for years: that the certification system at the heart of NYC housing enforcement is, in many cases, gamed.
How certification works
The HPD violation correction process has, in theory, a clear structure. An HPD inspector responds to a tenant complaint, typically filed through 311, and conducts a physical inspection. If the inspector confirms a violation, the violation is issued in one of three classifications:
— Class A (non-hazardous): 90 days to correct.
— Class B (hazardous): 30 days to correct.
— Class C (immediately hazardous, including no heat or hot water during heating season, lead-based paint where children under 6 live): 24 hours to correct.
The building owner, after making the required repair, files a "certification of correction" with HPD attesting that the violation has been remedied. The certification is, in many cases, the basis on which HPD considers the violation closed.
For most violations, the certification is taken at the owner's word. HPD does not, as a matter of routine, send an inspector back to verify every correction. Re-inspection occurs in a subset of cases — those flagged for follow-up, those subject to AEP (Alternative Enforcement Program) review, those that generate subsequent complaints, or those randomly selected by the agency.
When an owner files a certification claiming a correction that has not been made — and HPD does re-inspect — the certification is identified as false.
What the 2026 Watchlist quantifies
The 100 buildings on the 2026 Certification Watchlist had, according to HPD's own enforcement analysis, filed approximately 7,500 false certifications during 2025. Those certifications covered an estimated 20,000 hazardous violations — violations that the owners had certified as fixed but that HPD's re-inspection found still present.
The watchlist publication is itself an enforcement action. According to coverage by Violation Watch and other industry sources, HPD is treating the false certifications not as administrative errors but as deliberate fraud, with re-inspection scheduling, ongoing penalty assessment, and potential litigation for repeat offenders.
The 100 buildings on the watchlist are public information. The full list is available through HPD's enforcement announcements and through the agency's Alternative Enforcement Program documentation.
What the underlying pattern shows
The 7,500 false certifications across 100 buildings is not the full picture of false certifications across the entire NYC building stock. It represents the cases in which HPD actively re-inspected and found the certification incorrect. The agency's resources to re-inspect are limited.
Per HPD's own characterization, the watchlist focuses on buildings with the most systemic patterns — buildings where multiple false certifications occurred and where the underlying violations involve serious housing-code categories (heat, hot water, mold, lead, pest infestations, electrical, structural).
Several plausible inferences:
The 100 buildings are a sample of a larger phenomenon. Buildings where false certifications occur in ones and twos, rather than in dozens, may not trigger watchlist consideration but represent the same pattern at smaller scale.
The 7,500 number is HPD-verified. It reflects re-inspection findings, not allegations. Each certification on the list has been documented as inaccurate after physical re-inspection.
The 20,000 violations is the underlying severity measure. Hazardous Class B and C violations include conditions that require timely correction by law — no heat in winter, lead paint, structural issues that pose safety risks. A building with 200 violations certified as fixed but actually not fixed has, in practice, 200 hazardous conditions still present.
The scale of the watchlist — 100 buildings, 7,500 certifications, 20,000 violations — suggests that the certification system has limitations as a verification mechanism in the contexts where it is most consequential.
The broader violation landscape
According to the Mayor's Management Report FY2024 — the most recent complete fiscal year data — NYC HPD issued approximately 895,457 housing-code violations across all buildings in the city. That figure is up roughly 24 percent year-over-year.
The growth in violation issuance reflects multiple factors:
HPD added inspector capacity. In FY 2024, the agency hired over 100 new inspectors to keep pace with rising complaint volumes.
311 complaint volumes rose. Tenant complaints, the primary trigger for HPD inspections, have grown over multiple years.
Aging building stock and economic pressures. Many of NYC's older buildings carry maintenance costs that are increasingly difficult to absorb under current rent regulation.
The 895,457 total citywide violations is the universe within which the 7,500 false certifications and 20,000 falsely-certified violations sit. The watchlist is a focused enforcement action against the most egregious patterns within a much larger system.
What is verifiable for tenants
Every NYC tenant can check their building's violation history at hpdonline.nyc.gov by address or BIN. The portal shows:
— Open and closed violations — Violation class (A, B, or C) — Date issued — Class B and C correction deadlines — Certification status
For tenants in buildings where conditions appear to remain after a violation is certified as corrected, the public record provides documentation. A tenant who knows that mold remains in their bathroom, but the violation was certified as corrected on a specific date, has the basis for re-reporting and triggering re-inspection.
Additional verifications:
The Alternative Enforcement Program list. AEP buildings are subject to mandatory HPD inspections every three months. The list is public and updated.
The Underlying Conditions Program list. Local Law 6 of 2013 allows HPD to order corrections for systemic conditions (mold, water leaks). The list is public.
Owner portfolio. Buildings owned by the same individual or entity can be cross-referenced. Patterns of false certifications often appear across multiple buildings under common ownership.
Recent 311 complaints. Patterns of complaints, combined with violation issuance and certification status, indicate the operational state of a building.
For tenants in buildings appearing to have systemic patterns of false certifications, contacting a tenant legal services organization — Legal Aid Society, Legal Services NYC, Met Council on Housing — for an HP Action (Housing Court action to compel repairs) or for tenant collective action is the next step.
The enforcement context
The 2026 Watchlist arrives in a period of expanded HPD enforcement activity. Other recent actions in this category:
The May 11, 2026 announcement of a $31 million civil judgment against Karan Singh and Rajmattie Persaud, owners of Robert Fulton Terrace and Fordham Towers — the largest civil penalty in HPD's history. The buildings involved had accumulated more than 1,000 housing-code violations.
The February 2026 AEP expansion adding 250 buildings to the Alternative Enforcement Program. The expansion adds to the pool of buildings subject to mandatory inspection.
Ongoing litigation against landlords of 138 AEP buildings, per coverage of HPD enforcement priorities.
The $2.1 million settlement with A&E Real Estate, covering specific multi-building violations.
Whether the watchlist publication produces measurable correction of conditions in the 100 named buildings, or whether the publication primarily creates pressure for future compliance, will be observable in the buildings' own violation records over the coming months.
The structural question
The Certification Watchlist quantifies a specific gap: the gap between certifications filed and actual conditions corrected. The remedy for that gap, in regulatory terms, is some combination of:
— More re-inspection by HPD (which requires inspector capacity)
— Stronger penalties for false certification (which requires legal infrastructure)
— Tenant-side mechanisms to flag certifications that don't match observable conditions (which requires accessible tenant complaint pathways)
— Owner-side incentives to actually correct violations rather than just file paperwork (which requires that the cost of false certification exceed the cost of actual repair)
The 2026 Watchlist is, in part, an experiment in changing the incentive calculation. By publicly naming 100 buildings with documented patterns of false certifications, the agency is creating reputational and operational consequences that, in theory, alter the math for other building owners considering whether to certify a correction they have not actually made.
Whether the experiment succeeds — whether the rate of false certifications drops measurably across the broader NYC building stock over the next 12 to 24 months — will be observable in HPD's subsequent enforcement data.
The longer view
The 7,500 false certifications and 20,000 violations they covered represent a documented pattern of regulatory failure in a portion of NYC's housing stock. The publication of the watchlist represents a documented enforcement response.
Neither is a solution to the underlying conditions in the buildings — those conditions, by HPD's own re-inspection findings, continue to exist. The watchlist is a measurement and a public-pressure tool. The corrections, when they occur, will appear in the buildings' violation records.
For tenants in the 100 buildings named on the watchlist, the publication itself does not change the immediate condition of their apartment. What it does do is make their building's operational state more visible, more documented, and more subject to ongoing agency attention.
The data is public. The buildings are named. The corrections, if they come, will be visible the same way.
Sources: NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development 2026 Certification Watchlist enforcement announcement and AEP documentation; NYC Open Data Housing Maintenance Code Violations dataset (data.cityofnewyork.us, Socrata identifier wvxf-dwi5), last metadata update April 20, 2026; Violation Watch, "NYC Building Violations Report 2026: Borough-by-Borough Data, Maps & Rankings" (February 22, 2026), reporting 895,457 violations in FY2024 (up 24 percent YoY) and the 2026 Certification Watchlist (100 buildings, 7,500 false certifications, 20,000 violations); Mayor's Management Report FY2024 citywide violation totals; NYC Mayor's Office press release on $31 million Fordham/Fulton Terrace judgment (May 11, 2026); HPD Alternative Enforcement Program documentation; HPD Underlying Conditions Program (Local Law 6 of 2013); HPD Online violation database (hpdonline.nyc.gov); HPD certification of correction process documentation; coverage of A&E Real Estate $2.1 million settlement and ongoing AEP litigation.
