An ECB violation is a summons. It is issued when an inspector finds a breach of the city's construction, zoning, electrical or maintenance codes, and unlike an ordinary notice it carries a monetary penalty and a hearing date. ECB stands for the Environmental Control Board, whose hearings are now held at the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.
What one actually looks like
A real summons issued on 30 July 2026, with the field names the city's dataset uses:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| ecb_violation_number | 39198397R |
| issue_date | 20260730 |
| severity | CLASS - 1 |
| violation_type | Construction |
| infraction_code1 | 102 |
| penality_imposed | 2500 |
| ecb_violation_status | ACTIVE |
| hearing_status | PENDING |
| hearing_date | 20261014 |
The misspelling in penality_imposed is the city's, not ours — it is the real column name, and anyone querying the data has to spell it that way.
The severity classes
ECB summonses are graded by how serious the condition is. Across the full dataset the classes fall out like this:
| Severity | Summonses |
|---|---|
| Class 1 — immediately hazardous | 490,580 |
| Class 2 — major | 614,165 |
| Class 3 — lesser | 54,905 |
| Older labels: Hazardous / Non-Hazardous / Unknown | 667,953 combined |
Those last labels are a legacy vocabulary still attached to older rows. A file that has been running for decades accumulates more than one way of saying the same thing, and it is worth knowing before you conclude that a building has no classified violations.
This is where the "class" confusion starts
Class 1, 2 and 3 belong to ECB summonses. They are not the same as HPD's letter classes, which grade apartment conditions on an A/B/C scale — see HPD violation classes. And they are not a property of an ordinary DOB violation, which is categorised a different way again. Three agencies, three vocabularies, one building.
How it ends
Every summons is answerable at a hearing, and the outcome is recorded. The commonest results across the dataset:
| Hearing result | Count |
|---|---|
| In violation | 679,464 |
| Dismissed | 297,942 |
| Written off | 243,998 |
| Cured, in violation | 214,174 |
| Default (no appearance) | 162,858 |
Nearly 300,000 summonses were dismissed. That is the single most important number on this page: an issued summons is an allegation until a hearing decides it, and a meaningful share do not survive one. Default is worth understanding too — it means nobody turned up, and the penalty is imposed without the case being argued.
Reading it fairly
An open ECB violation on a building tells you the city cited a condition and the matter has not been resolved. It does not tell you the current state of the building, whether the work was since done, or anything about the people who live there. Records also lag: a condition fixed last week may still read as open. Treat it as a documented event with a date, which is exactly what it is.
Sources: NYC Department of Buildings — DOB/ECB Violations (6bgk-3dad). Counts are live totals on the date queried and move as the file updates. General information about public records — not legal advice, and not a rating of any building or person.