Reference
Class A — Non-Hazardous
Cosmetic and minor maintenance issues. Examples: chipped paint that is not lead-based, missing or illegible apartment numbers, mailbox damage, minor wall cracks, missing house-number signs. Owners have 90 days from the date of the notice of violation to certify correction.
Class B — Hazardous
Conditions that pose a health or safety risk if left uncorrected. Examples: peeling lead-based paint in apartments where children under six reside, missing self-closing doors on fire-rated stairs, defective window guards in apartments with young children, mold (most mold violations are cited as Class B), broken locks on building entry doors. Owners have 30 days to certify correction.
Class C — Immediately Hazardous
Conditions posing an immediate threat to occupants. Examples: no heat or hot water during heat season (October 1 through May 31), missing or non-working smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors, unaddressed lead paint hazards in apartments with children under six, vermin and rodent infestations, sewage backflow, exposed live electrical wiring. Owners have 24 hours to correct (or 21 days for certain lead paint subcategories).
Process and scale
An HPD inspector cites the violation under the Housing Maintenance Code. The owner has the listed correction window, then certifies correction; HPD may re-inspect to verify. Failure to correct triggers civil penalties; chronic Class C accumulation across a single building can lead to Alternative Enforcement Program (AEP) enrollment. HPD’s public Open Data feed (dataset wvxf-dwi5) updates daily and shows millions of historical and currently-open violations.
A common reading mistake is to compare absolute violation counts across operators of different sizes. A landlord with 5,000 units and 1,000 open Class C violations is meaningfully different from a landlord with 200 units and 1,000 open Class C violations — the per-unit rate matters. Most rigorous distress rankings, including MetroDeeds’, normalize by unit count rather than report raw totals.
Open vs. closed status
Every HPD violation has a status field. Common values: Open (the violation has been issued and the correction window has not been satisfied), Closed (the owner has certified correction or HPD inspection has confirmed correction), and Dismissed (HPD has rescinded the violation, often after owner-side challenge). When most distress analyses talk about "violations per unit," they mean open violations only. A building with thousands of historical Class C citations that have all been closed has a different profile from a building with hundreds of Class C citations currently open. The Open Data feed includes both, and consumers of the data have to decide which view they want; MetroDeeds defaults to open.
A few classes of violation get special handling. Lead paint violations have a separate correction window (21 days for some Class C lead paint subcategories rather than the standard 24 hours) under the NYC Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act. Heat and hot water violations only count during the official heat season (October 1 through May 31) — a no-heat citation in July is procedurally different from one in January. These exceptions matter for any analysis that tries to weight violations by severity beyond the A/B/C class.
What MetroDeeds does with this
HPD's Open Data feed shows you the violation severity per building. What it does not show — and what most casual users of the dataset miss — is the operator-level pattern across an entire portfolio.
MetroDeeds rolls every open HPD violation up to the named operator that controls the building, normalizes by unit count, and breaks the result out as Class A, B, and C separately on every operator profile. The Landlord Ripoff Watch leaderboard shows a stacked bar of A/B/C counts per operator alongside the distress score so you can see at a glance whether an operator’s violation footprint skews toward cosmetic Class A issues or genuinely hazardous Class C conditions. Operator profile pages elevate Class C as a top stat box because Class C is the dominant input into the distress score.
Beyond the rollup, the score itself uses a fixed-threshold normalization: each operator’s Class C-per-unit rate is compared against the 90th-percentile threshold across the full operator population, so a high score reflects relative position in NYC, not a fixed absolute violation count. A landlord can have a low absolute Class C total and still rank high if their per-unit rate falls in the worst 10% citywide.
Class A, B, and C breakdowns are visible at every tier on the Landlord Ripoff Watch — no signup required.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between Class A, B, and C HPD violations?
Class A is non-hazardous (cosmetic / minor) with a 90-day correction window. Class B is hazardous (poses a health or safety risk) with a 30-day window. Class C is immediately hazardous with a 24-hour window (or 21 days for certain lead paint subcategories).
Are HPD violations criminal charges?
No. HPD violations are civil enforcement under the NYC Housing Maintenance Code. Criminal charges for housing conditions are pursued separately by HPD’s Housing Litigation Division, the New York State Attorney General, or the local District Attorney depending on the conduct involved.
What happens if a Class C violation is not corrected?
HPD assesses civil penalties, may re-inspect, and can enroll the building in the Alternative Enforcement Program for chronic offenders. AEP enrollment authorizes HPD to perform emergency repairs and bill the cost back to the owner via tax lien.
How current is HPD violation data?
HPD’s Open Data feed (dataset wvxf-dwi5) refreshes daily. New violations typically appear within 24–48 hours of the inspection that generated them.
Does MetroDeeds show every violation or just open ones?
Operator-level rollups on the Landlord Ripoff Watch use only open violations — records whose status is not Closed or Dismissed. Individual operator profile pages also surface historical violation counts and recent inspection activity for context.