NYC HPD inspectors cited 77,989 Class C ("immediately hazardous") Housing Maintenance Code violations against 14,756 distinct NYC buildings between January 1 and March 31, 2026 — alongside 116,191 Class B and Class A citations, for a Q1 total of 194,180 violations issued. This report ranks the named for-profit residential operators whose portfolios absorbed the most Q1 Class C citations.
Source: NYC HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations (Open Data). Q1 2026 = inspectiondate ≥ 2026-01-01 AND < 2026-04-01 AND class = "C". MetroDeeds operator attribution via HPD registration → operator_portfolio_cache.bbls join.
How we got the ranking
HPD operates a public Open Data feed of every cited Housing Maintenance Code violation (dataset wvxf-dwi5), refreshed daily. We pulled every Q1 2026 record where class = "C" and bucketed each violation against the BBL of the building it was cited at. Each BBL was then mapped to the named operator (head officer, corporate owner, or accountable IndividualOwner) controlling the building today, using the same HPD-registration-driven join the public Landlord Ripoff Watch runs on. The ranking that follows excludes property-management agents and HPD SiteManagers — only operators on the for-profit Landlord Ripoff Watch are eligible. NYCHA, non-profit affordable-housing operators, and co-op / condo management firms are excluded by the same registry rules documented on the LRW methodology page.
Q1 Class C citations were attributed to 1,017 distinct named operators on the LRW. The ten operators below each absorbed more than 400 Q1 Class C citations across their HPD-registered portfolios.
The top-10 — Q1 2026 Class C absorbers
- Peter Fine — 1,550 Q1 Class C citations across 160 BBLs (LRW score 99). Largest single absorber by a meaningful margin.
- Margaret Brunn — 842 across 82 BBLs (LRW score 99).
- Steve Zervoudis — 739 across 103 BBLs (LRW score 98).
- Donald Hastings — 729 across 48 BBLs (LRW score 99).
- Ved Parkash — 633 across 54 BBLs (LRW score 98).
- David Tennenbaum — 585 across 58 BBLs (LRW score 99).
- Adam Goodstein — 497 across 66 BBLs (LRW score 68 — the only operator in the top-10 below the LRW score cap).
- Angela Gazivoda — 488 across 48 BBLs (LRW score 98).
- Moshe Piller — 434 across 46 BBLs (LRW score 98).
- Ian Lagowitz — 421 across 37 BBLs (LRW score 99).
What the ranking does and doesn't say
This is a volume ranking, not a per-unit-rate ranking. The MetroDeeds distress score (the basis for the Landlord Ripoff Watch leaderboard) normalizes Class C violations by unit count, which deliberately keeps very large portfolios from dominating the worst-landlord story by scale alone. By contrast, the Q1 ranking here is the raw absolute count of citations issued during the quarter — useful for understanding which named operators carry the heaviest hazardous-condition load citywide, but not for comparing operators of meaningfully different sizes.
The presence of Adam Goodstein at LRW score 68 (vs. score 98–99 for the other nine) illustrates a related caveat: an operator can rank high in absolute Q1 Class C absorption while sitting in the moderate-distress band on the per-unit-normalized leaderboard. Goodstein's 497 Q1 Class C citations spread across 66 BBLs work out to an average of 7.5 per building — meaningfully lower density than Tennenbaum's 10.1 or Donald Hastings' 15.2.
For the per-unit-normalized view, the Landlord Ripoff Watch leaderboard is the right surface. For the absolute-count question — "which named operator absorbed the most Class C citations during Q1 2026?" — this report is the answer. Both views are sourced from the same NYC HPD Open Data feed.