NYC's Smallest Apartment Buildings Have Four Times More Dangerous Violations Per Apartment Than Its Largest

Across 36,584 New York City apartment buildings, the smallest ones carry the heaviest load of serious housing violations per apartment. Buildings with six units or fewer average 60 immediately-hazardous violations per 100 apartments. Buildings with 38 units or more average 14. Yet a large building is nearly twice as likely as a small one to have any open hazardous violation at all.

Both facts are true at once, and together they describe a blind spot.

If you ask which New York buildings have housing problems, the honest answer is: the big ones. Four out of five buildings with 38 or more apartments have at least one open immediately-hazardous violation. Among buildings with six apartments or fewer, fewer than half do. By that measure — absolute violation counts — large buildings can look far worse.

But "does this building have a violation" and "how bad is it to live here" are different questions. When we divide violations by the number of apartments, the ranking inverts.

What we measured

We took every building in Weverit's catalog with a reported unit count and a current HPD violation record — 36,584 buildings — and sorted them into four equal groups by size. For each group we counted open violations in HPD's two serious categories: Class C ("immediately hazardous" — conditions such as no heat or hot water, lead paint hazards, mold, pests, and missing window guards) and Class B ("hazardous"). Then we divided by the total number of apartments in the group.

The gradient is steep and it is monotonic: every step up in building size lowers the violation load per apartment. Between the smallest and largest groups the gap is 4.3-fold for Class C and 5.5-fold for Class B.

The Class B figure matters because it rules out a narrow explanation. If only the most severe category showed the pattern, you could argue it reflects how inspectors triage emergencies. It shows up in both categories, and more sharply in the less severe one.

Three common explanations, and what the data shows

"Small buildings are just older." Median year of construction runs 1927, 1925, 1922, and 1934 across the four groups — a spread of twelve years, with the newest median sitting in the largest-building group. An age difference of that size does not appear large enough, by itself, to account for a gap of this magnitude.

"It's public housing skewing the large-building numbers." NYCHA developments make up 1.4% of the largest group. Removing them entirely moves the Class C figure from 13.9 to 14.4 per 100 apartments — the gap stays.

"Rent-stabilized buildings are worse maintained." The share of rent-stabilized buildings rises steadily with size: 47% in the smallest group, 59%, 78%, and 80% in the largest. The group with the most stabilization has the fewest violations per apartment. The pattern does not support a simple explanation in which higher rates of rent stabilization go with higher violation density — though stabilization correlates with many other building characteristics we are not holding constant.

It holds in every borough

The pattern is not a Manhattan-versus-Bronx artifact. Comparing small buildings (14 units or fewer) against large ones (38+) within each borough:

Boroughs differ from each other by a factor of three. Small versus large differs by a factor of three to six inside each borough. Whatever is happening, geography isn't it.

A consistency check

We arrived at a similar number by a different route earlier this year. In our analysis of the city's Alternative Enforcement Program, 42.9% of discharged AEP buildings with six units or fewer received at least one new serious violation within a year of discharge. In this catalog-wide analysis, 42.6% of buildings with six units or fewer have an open Class C violation.

The two figures are close, although they measure different things: one tracks new serious violations issued after AEP discharge, the other counts buildings with an open Class C violation at a single point in time. Both ultimately rest on the same HPD violation records. The similarity is a useful consistency check; it does not establish that the two measures are equivalent.

Why the small ones draw less attention

Here is where the two facts collide.

The city's own selection machinery does account for size in at least one place: HPD's Alternative Enforcement Program criteria include the ratio of hazardous and immediately hazardous violations to dwelling units, and the program now selects 250 buildings annually. But absolute violation counts are often easier to see and compare than violations per apartment. A 200-unit building with 80 open violations gets attention. A 4-unit building with 6 open violations can look like a rounding error, even though the second building has nearly four times as many violations per apartment.

Several mechanisms could widen the gap, and this data cannot separate them:

Inspection and complaint density. One possibility is that more apartments mean more tenants, more opportunities for complaints to be filed, and potentially more inspections. Our data cannot determine whether this contributes to the observed gap.

Management capacity. Smaller buildings may have fewer dedicated management resources, but our data does not measure staffing, maintenance budgets, or management structure.

Concentration. One broken boiler in a small building affects every apartment in it. The same boiler in a large building is one violation spread across many more units — but the per-apartment arithmetic is not wrong for that reason. It is what a tenant in the small building experiences.

Our data cannot determine how much of the difference comes from reporting, inspection frequency, or actual physical conditions.

What this means if you're renting

The practical takeaway inverts a common assumption. Renters often treat a small, owner-occupied building as the safer bet — quieter, more personal, less institutional. On the city's own records, small buildings carry more open serious violations per apartment than large ones, in every borough, in both severity classes we measured.

That does not mean any particular small building is bad. It means the category offers less reassurance than people assume, and the usual signals — the building isn't in the news, it's not on a worst-landlord list, it has only a handful of violations — can make a small building appear less problematic simply because it generates fewer violations in absolute numbers.

Check the individual building. The record is public and free: HPD Online lists every violation by address, and Weverit's building reports compile open violations by hazard class, how long the oldest ones have been open, and complaint history across 38,485 NYC buildings.

Methodology and limitations

Data: HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations as compiled in Weverit's building reports. Each building's violation counts are current as of the date its report was last generated; across the 36,584 buildings in this analysis those dates fall between August and September 2026, with a median of August 16, 2026, and 96% generated within the preceding 90 days. This is a rolling window, not a single-day snapshot of the city.

Unit counts come from the reported residential unit count for each building. Buildings were divided into four equal groups by unit count; quartile boundaries are 6, 14, and 38 units. Violations counted are those currently open in HPD's records, by hazard class.

This is a stock measure, not a flow measure. It counts violations open at a moment in time, not violations issued over a period. A building with long-unresolved old violations and a building with many recent ones can look alike here.

This analysis cannot separate the causes listed above. Inspection frequency, complaint rates, and physical conditions all feed into the same number, and open data does not distinguish them. What the data shows is that violation density per apartment rises sharply as buildings get smaller, and that age, public housing, and rent regulation do not by themselves explain the size of that gap. Why it happens is a question this raises rather than answers.

Buildings without a reported unit count, and buildings with no HPD violation record at all, are excluded from the group calculations. All figures are Weverit's calculations from public records, not figures published by HPD.

Sources

• NYC HPD — Housing Maintenance Code Violations, NYC Open Data: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Housing-Maintenance-Code-Violations/wvxf-dwi5
• NYC HPD — Buildings Selected for the Alternative Enforcement Program, NYC Open Data: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Buildings-Selected-for-the-Alternative-Enforcement/hcir-3275
• NYC Administrative Code § 27-2153, Alternative enforcement program
• NYC HPD — Alternative Enforcement Program: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/alternative-enforcement-program-aep.page
• NYC HPD — Penalties and Fees (violation classes): https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/penalties-and-fees.page
• HPD Online: https://hpdonline.nyc.gov