Every year, New York City selects roughly 250 apartment buildings with the most serious unresolved housing-code problems and places them in the Alternative Enforcement Program. The city publishes the list. What it does not publish is what happens next.
We joined the city's AEP records with the full HPD violation history for every AEP selection record since 2007 — 4,387 building-round records covering 3,653 distinct buildings — to answer one question: after a building is discharged, what happens to its violation record?
Three numbers summarize what we found. In our analysis, the rate at which the city issued serious violations against a building dropped from a median of 40 per year before AEP selection to 9 per year after discharge — a roughly fourfold reduction. The median building spent 5.9 months in the program. And 597 of the 3,653 buildings have been selected for AEP more than once — with 40% of those returns coming within two years of discharge.
What AEP is
The Alternative Enforcement Program is run by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development. It targets residential buildings with a high concentration of Class B (hazardous) and Class C (immediately hazardous) violations relative to their size, plus unpaid emergency-repair charges. Once selected, a building faces intensified inspections, orders to correct, and — if the owner does not act — city-performed repairs billed back to the owner. A building can be discharged after meeting HPD's statutory discharge requirements. HPD states that it monitors discharged buildings for at least one year afterward.
For the 2026 round, HPD placed 250 buildings into the program. According to the city, those buildings carried 54,909 open violations across 7,038 homes and were associated with nearly $4.5 million in unpaid emergency-repair charges.
Being placed in AEP is the beginning of a process. We wanted to see the end of it.
What we did
We took the city's AEP dataset — every building-round record from rounds 1 through 19, November 2007 to February 2026 — and matched each building's BIN to the HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations dataset, which records every violation issued with its class and issue date.
For each discharged building, we counted Class B and C violations issued in the twelve months before its AEP selection and in the twelve months after its discharge. That gives a like-for-like comparison: the rate at which the city was issuing serious violations against the building before intervention, and the rate after the city discharged it. Because HPD says it monitors discharged buildings for at least one year, our 12-month post-discharge window also corresponds to the city's own stated monitoring period. Where a building was discharged more than once, building-level figures use its most recent discharge.
Coverage: the AEP dataset contains 4,387 building-round records. Four records have no BIN and were excluded from the building-level match. The remaining records represent 3,653 distinct buildings. Four of those buildings could not be matched to an HPD violation record — likely demolished or merged lots. Violation history in the dataset extends back to 1965, so the pre-selection window is complete even for the earliest rounds. Of the 3,653 buildings, 2,957 have been discharged at least once and 867 are currently active in the program; 171 buildings are in both groups, having been discharged from one round and selected again in a later one.
What we found
The rate of new serious violations drops sharply after discharge. Before selection, the median AEP building was receiving 40 serious violations per year. In the year after discharge, our analysis found that number was 9 — roughly a fourfold reduction. Among discharges where the building had been receiving serious violations before selection, 18% returned to their pre-AEP rate or worse.
But most discharged buildings still receive new serious violations — and building size is strongly associated with whether they do. In our analysis, 67.5% of discharged buildings received at least one new Class B or C violation within a year of leaving the program; within two years, 75.1% had. That headline figure, however, tracks closely with how large the building is:
| Current reported building size (units) | Buildings | Discharged buildings with ≥1 new B/C violation within 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| 6 or fewer | 1,404 | 42.9% |
| 7–8 | 363 | 71.1% |
| 9–22 | 872 | 87.4% |
| 23 or more | 877 | 97.5% |
For large buildings, receiving at least one new serious violation in the year after discharge is extremely common. For the smallest buildings, fewer than half do. Whether that reflects more apartments generating more complaints, more inspections, or genuinely worse conditions per unit, the dataset cannot say. What it does show is that the size gradient is large enough to make the raw building-level percentage a poor standalone measure of post-AEP performance — which is why the flow-based measures above — the fourfold drop in issuance rate and the share returning to the pre-program rate — are the better test of what AEP achieves.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| AEP building-round records, 2007–2026 | 4,387 |
| Records without a BIN (excluded) | 4 |
| Distinct buildings | 3,653 |
| Distinct buildings discharged at least once | 2,957 |
| Distinct buildings currently active | 867 |
| In both groups (discharged, later re-selected) | 171 |
| Median time in program (per discharge) | 5.9 months |
| 25th / 75th percentile | 4.2 / 31.3 months |
| Longest stay | 16.7 years |
| Median serious violations/year, 12 months before selection | 40 |
| Median serious violations/year, 12 months after discharge | 9 |
| Discharge events returning to pre-AEP violation rate or worse | 18.0% |
| Discharged buildings with ≥1 new B/C violation within 12 months | 67.5% |
| Within 24 months | 75.1% |
| Distinct buildings selected for AEP more than once | 597 |
| Median time from discharge to re-selection | 31.7 months |
| Returns to AEP within 24 months of discharge | 291 of 721 (40%) |
Time in program has a long tail. Half of discharges came within six months. But a quarter took more than two and a half years, and the longest took nearly seventeen. Buildings that meet the discharge requirements quickly can leave within months, while others remain for years.
Borough differences largely track building size. The raw share of discharged buildings receiving a new serious violation within a year ranges from 89.6% in Manhattan to 56.5% in Staten Island. But the median AEP building in Manhattan has 21 units; in the Bronx, 16; in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, 6. When we compare boroughs within the same building-size band, the gap narrows sharply: among buildings with 6 or fewer units, Manhattan's rate is 47.1% against Queens's 46.0% and Brooklyn's 44.9%; among buildings with 23 or more units, every borough is at 97–100%, and Manhattan is not the highest. The borough gap largely tracks building size. Within the same size bands the differences are much smaller, and we do not see a clear borough pattern independent of size.
The buildings that come back
597 of the 3,653 distinct buildings in the dataset — about one in six — have been selected for AEP in more than one round. For these buildings, discharge was not the end of the story but an interval between enforcement episodes.
We measured that interval. Across the 721 discharge-to-reselection intervals in the dataset (some buildings have returned more than once), the median gap between leaving the program and being selected again was 31.7 months. But the distribution is front-loaded: 138 returns came within 12 months of discharge, and 291 — 40% of all returns — came within 24 months.
Set that against HPD's stated monitoring period of at least one year after discharge. In our data, roughly one in five returns occurs inside that first year, when the building is still under watch. The other four in five occur after monitoring has ended — and the largest share of those falls in the second year. A building discharged in January is, on the numbers, most at risk of coming back in the eighteen months after the city stops looking.
We cannot say from this data whether longer monitoring would have prevented those returns. What the data does say is where the returns cluster: not during the year the city watches, but in the year after.
What this means for renters
A building's presence on the current AEP list tells you it is severely distressed right now. A building's absence from the list tells you much less than it appears to.
The more useful question is the building's trajectory: when did it enter, how long did it stay, was it discharged, and what happened to its violation record afterward — measured against its size. A 100-unit building discharged in 2019 with ten serious violations since has a very different violation rate per unit from a 6-unit building with the same count. And a building discharged eighteen months ago is, statistically, in the window when returns to the program are most common.
HPD Online publishes the full violation history for any building. The AEP dataset on NYC Open Data lists every building ever selected, with its status and discharge date. Weverit's building reports aggregate the HPD violation record; of the 3,653 distinct buildings in the AEP dataset, 2,104 currently have a report in our catalog.
Why repeat problems are a policy question
The city's own framework increasingly focuses on repeat offenders. In July 2026, the Mayor's office released a "Rental Ripoff Report" with 23 proposed policy actions, including stronger enforcement against landlords with recurring violations. Our data suggests the problem the report seeks to address is real: 597 buildings cycled through AEP more than once, 291 of them within two years of discharge, while 18% of discharges returned to their pre-program violation rate or worse. Those patterns are consistent with the report's focus on repeat offenders.
Whether AEP's current discharge criteria are strict enough — or whether post-discharge monitoring should extend beyond one year to cover the period when returns actually cluster — is a question for HPD and the Council. The numbers here are the starting point for that conversation, not the answer to it.
Methodology and limitations
This analysis uses two public datasets: HPD's Buildings Selected for the Alternative Enforcement Program (NYC Open Data hcir-3275, updated September 1, 2026) and HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations (wvxf-dwi5, updated September 7, 2026). Buildings were matched by BIN. "Serious violations" means Class B and Class C as recorded by HPD. Before/after comparison uses violations issued, not violations open — a flow measure, not a stock measure, so the two windows are comparable.
Two units of analysis are used and labeled throughout. Building-level figures (2,957 discharged buildings; 67.5% and 75.1% with a new violation; 597 repeat entrants; the size and borough tables) count each distinct building once, using its most recent discharge. Per-discharge figures (median time in program; the 18% returning to their pre-AEP rate, whose denominator is the 3,108 discharge records with serious violations issued in the year before selection; the 721 discharge-to-reselection intervals) count each discharge event. Building size uses the TOTAL_UNITS field as currently reported in the AEP dataset, which HPD notes may differ from the unit count at the time of selection; all buildings had at least three dwelling units when selected. A further 16 records carry one of HPD's placeholder BIN values (1000000, 2000000, 3000000), which the city uses when a building identifier is not established; these cover 14 distinct addresses collapsed into three identifiers. They are retained in the counts, and the effect on building-level figures is 0.08%.
This is an observational before-and-after analysis, not a causal estimate of AEP's effect. We do not claim that AEP itself caused the decline in violation rates; the two windows sit at different points in time and under potentially different enforcement conditions. Likewise, the timing of returns to the program reflects when HPD's selection rounds occur as well as when buildings deteriorate; the clustering in the second year after discharge should be read as descriptive, not causal.
Further limitations: violation issuance depends partly on tenant complaints and inspection frequency, both of which scale with building size and may change after a building enters AEP — the size gradient reported above is the clearest evidence of this. Buildings never discharged are excluded from the after-discharge analysis. All percentages and medians are Weverit's calculations from the public datasets, not figures published by HPD. Figures reflect the datasets as of September 2026 and will change as records are updated.
Data and analysis scripts are retained and can be re-run as the datasets update.
Sources
- NYC HPD — Buildings Selected for the Alternative Enforcement Program (AEP), NYC Open Data: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Buildings-Selected-for-the-Alternative-Enforcement/hcir-3275
- NYC HPD — Housing Maintenance Code Violations, NYC Open Data: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Housing-Maintenance-Code-Violations/wvxf-dwi5
- NYC HPD — Alternative Enforcement Program: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/alternative-enforcement-program-aep.page
- NYC HPD — 2026 AEP announcement: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/004-26/mamdani-administration-stricter-enforcement-city-s-250-most-distressed-apartment
- NYC Mayor's Office — Rental Ripoff Report, July 16, 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-releases--rental-ripoff-report---outlining-new-act
- HPD Online: https://hpdonline.nyc.gov
