ByTenants
Methodology
Where every fact on a building page comes from, how old it can be, and what it cannot tell you. If a building page and this page ever disagree, write to hello@bytenants.com. One of them is wrong.
Five labels
Every item on a building page carries a label that says who recorded it. The label says where a fact came from; the item’s own words say what happened. A complaint is never shown as a violation.
- Official violation
- A city inspector visited and recorded a code violation. HPD's own words, and its own hazard class.
- Public complaint
- A complaint somebody made to a city system, through HPD or 311. A report, not a finding: nobody has necessarily inspected it.
- Public filing
- A permit, a registration, a bedbug report: a document the owner filed with the city because the law requires it.
- Tenant-reported
- A resident's firsthand account of living here, moderated before it publishes, and labelled with whether we verified they lived there.
- Insufficient data
- Not enough current information here to infer a pattern either way.
Tenant reviews are not live yet, so no page shows the Tenant-reported label today.
What the violation count counts
The number at the top of a building page is open violations in HPD’s three hazard classes:
- Immediately hazardous. Class C. HPD considers the condition an immediate danger: no heat in winter, no hot water, lead paint where a child lives, a broken lock on the front door. The owner has 24 hours to correct it.
- Hazardous. Class B. A hazardous condition: a leak, mould, a defective floor. The owner has 30 days to correct it.
- Non-hazardous. Class A. The least serious band: chipped plaster, a missing cabinet, a peeling ceiling in a hallway. The owner has 90 days to correct it.
It leaves out paperwork: a missing annual registration statement or bedbug report. Those are real violations and they say something about an owner, but they are about a fifth of all violations in Astoria and none of them is a reason not to sign a lease. They are still on the page, in their own group, so HPD’s own total can always be added back up. Vacate orders are never treated as paperwork, whatever class HPD filed them under.
Sources
All from New York City Open Data, copied into our own database every night at 07:00 UTC. No page queries the city live, so a page is at most a day behind the city, and the city is sometimes behind the building.
HPD housing maintenance code violations
wvxf-dwi5 · Nightly
What we keep: Every violation on record, open and closed.
What it can’t tell you: “Open” means HPD has not recorded it as corrected. Owners certify their own repairs, and some fixed conditions stay open for years because nobody filed the paperwork, while some “closed” ones were certified and never re-inspected.
HPD complaints
ygpa-z7cr · Nightly
What we keep: The last five years.
What it can’t tell you: A complaint is a report, not a finding. Buildings with tenants who know how to complain look worse than buildings with tenants who do not.
311 service requests
erm2-nwe9 · Nightly
What we keep: The last three years, and only 21 request types that describe the building itself.
What it can’t tell you: Most of 311 is about the street (parked cars, trees, noise from a bar), and its location is whatever address the city's geocoder chose, so everything outside the list is dropped. Housing complaints made through 311 are counted once, from HPD, not twice.
DOB permits
rbx6-tga4 · ipu4-2q9a · Nightly
What we keep: The last five years, from both the current DOB NOW system and the older BIS system.
What it can’t tell you: A permit says work was approved, not that it was done, or done well. Work done without a permit is not here.
Bedbug annual filings
wz6d-d3jb · Nightly
What we keep: Every filing in the dataset.
What it can’t tell you: Filed by the owner, about their own building, and not checked by anyone. A missing filing is itself a violation, and usually means the owner did not file.
HPD Housing Court litigation
59kj-x8nc · Nightly
What we keep: Every case, 2004 on: case type, status, and the court's outcome. Not the names of the owner's officers listed as respondents.
What it can’t tell you: Only cases HPD brought or joined; a tenant's own case against the landlord is not here. Most cases end without a harassment finding either way, and a finding is against whoever owned the building at the time.
Marshal evictions
6z8x-wfk4 · Nightly
What we keep: Residential evictions, 2017 on: the date only. We never fetch the apartment number, and we do not keep case numbers.
What it can’t tell you: Counts by year, never individual evictions. Most follow a nonpayment case, so a count is not a finding about the building or the landlord.
HPD registrations and contacts
tesw-yqqr · feu5-w2e2 · Nightly
What we keep: The current registration only; the city does not publish past ones.
What it can’t tell you: Registration renews once a year, so a sale can go unrecorded for up to a year. We keep our own dated copy from September 2026 on, so ownership changes can be detected from then, not before.
PLUTO (tax lots)
64uk-42ks · Once a year, when the city releases it
What we keep: Which lots are rental buildings: address, apartments, year built, building class.
What it can’t tell you: Addresses are written inconsistently, so a building is always identified by its tax lot (BBL), never by its address.
Addresses typed into search are matched to a tax lot with NYC Planning’s GeoSearch. Neighbourhoods are the city’s 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas.
What we leave out on purpose
Eviction filings and housing-court cases
Not shown, and not collected. A filing is not a judgment. Matching a court case to the right building and owner is unreliable. And court papers name the tenant, and publishing them would rebuild the tenant blacklist that tenant advocates have spent years getting sealed, on a site whose whole purpose is the opposite.
The people behind a company
HPD registrations also list the officers and shareholders behind a company that owns a building, and the building’s superintendent. We show only the owner and the managing agent: the parties HPD publishes so a tenant can find someone legally responsible.
How ownership links are made
A building page shows the owner and managing agent named on its current HPD registration, and lists other buildings whose registrations name the same party.
- Two registrations are treated as naming the same party only if the name is the same once punctuation is ignored, so CENTRAL ASTORIA, LLC and CENTRAL ASTORIA..LLC are one company, as HPD plainly meant.
- Nothing else links them: no guessing at similar names, and no grouping by a shared mailing address. Either would be us claiming two companies are one, which we will not do.
- So the list can be incomplete: one landlord operating through several differently named companies appears as several. It is never padded.
- Each link shows the date we last saw it on a registration. Registrations can lag a sale by a year, so a building with no recorded change may still have changed hands.
Something wrong? Every ownership section has a “Report a correction” link, which goes to disputes@bytenants.com.
Coverage
We hold the full record for rental buildings with six or more apartments in Astoria (11102, 11103, 11105, 11106), Ridgewood (11385) and Bushwick (11237). Any other New York City address with at least one apartment gets a page when someone searches for it; its record loads overnight, and until it does the page says so rather than looking clean.