Every year, on or about 31 January, New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development names 250 severely distressed apartment buildings for the Alternative Enforcement Program. AEP is what happens when ordinary violation-by-violation enforcement has stopped working: the building is put under intensified supervision, the owner is required to fix underlying systems rather than individual conditions, and if they do not, the city does the work and bills them for it.
How a building gets selected
Selection is based on accumulated distress rather than a single incident. HPD weighs:
- the number of Class B (hazardous) and Class C (immediately hazardous) housing maintenance code violations — see HPD violation classes;
- the emergency repair charges the city has run up doing work the owner did not do.
The conditions that drive selection are the ordinary catastrophic ones: mould, heat outages, no hot water, pest infestation, structural neglect. A building does not arrive in AEP by accident or by one bad winter.
Nineteen rounds, and what they look like
The programme has run since 2007. The city's public file records 4,387 building participations across 19 rounds — early rounds of 200 buildings, later ones of 250. The most recent, Round 19, began on 2 February 2026 with 250 buildings.
Here is a real record from Round 1, which shows both the scale of distress that qualifies and the fact that buildings do come out the other side:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| street_address | 195 LENOX ROAD, Brooklyn |
| total_units | 12 |
| aep_round | Aep Round 1 |
| aep_start_date | 2007-11-13 |
| of_b_c_violations_at_start | 1,106 |
| current_status | AEP Discharged |
| discharge_date | 2011-11-02 |
Twelve apartments carrying 1,106 hazardous and immediately hazardous violations at the point of selection — roughly 92 per unit. It took four years, and the building was discharged. Across the whole file, 3,510 participations have ended in discharge and 877 are currently active.
What happens to a building in the programme
- Notice and a fee. The owner is told the building has been designated, and a participation fee is charged and can become a lien against the property.
- Underlying conditions, not symptoms. The owner must correct root causes — the boiler, the roof, the plumbing — rather than closing individual violations as they arise.
- The city may do the work. If the owner does not, HPD can perform the repairs and bill the owner, and unpaid charges can become a lien.
- Discharge. A building leaves the programme once the required work is done and the conditions are cleared. That is what the discharge date in the record above marks.
How to read an AEP flag
An AEP designation is one of the strongest signals in the whole body of New York City building data, because it is not a single inspector's finding — it is the city's own assessment that a building sits among the worst 250 it manages. But read it with its dates. A building currently in AEP is a live situation. A building discharged in 2011 was in serious trouble fifteen years ago and has since been through a programme designed to fix it, quite possibly under a different owner. Those are very different facts, and the record distinguishes them.
Checking a building
AEP participation is public and keyed to the building's BIN. Check a Building shows it alongside the building's violations, complaints and other city programmes, with the round, the start date and the current status as HPD publishes them. If a building you live in is in the programme and conditions are not improving, filing a complaint still matters — the violation record is part of what the programme is measured against.
Sources: NYC HPD — Alternative Enforcement Program; NYC Open Data — Buildings Selected for the Alternative Enforcement Program (hcir-3275). Counts and the sample record are live values on the date queried. General information about public records, not legal advice.