The City Repairs What Landlords Won't

There is a point at which New York City stops asking a landlord to fix something and fixes it itself. Between 1 August 2025 and 31 July 2026 that happened 27,158 times, across 11,251 separate buildings — about 74 work orders a day, every day, for a year.

This is not an inspection programme and it is not a fine. It is the city hiring a contractor, sending them into a building it does not own, having the work done, and billing the owner for it. The bill, if unpaid, becomes a lien on the property that outranks the mortgage.

How a building ends up here

A condition is reported and inspected. The owner is ordered to correct it. The owner does not. Where the condition is hazardous enough to leave, HPD's Emergency Repair Program arranges the work itself — through a contractor on an Open Market Order, or for smaller jobs a Handyman Work Order — and charges the cost to the property.

That last step is what makes these records worth counting. A violation records that an inspector found something. An emergency repair order records that the city gave up waiting. Under NYC Administrative Code section 27-2144 the resulting charge becomes a lien when it is due and payable, is expressly a tax lien, may be sold or foreclosed, and has priority over every other lien except taxes and assessments.

The year in totals

The two programmes are wildly different in scale. Open Market Orders are contracted jobs and carry essentially all of the money; Handyman Work Orders are small in-house tasks whose recorded charges average about $29 apiece. The building counts are not added together in that table on purpose — a building can appear in both files, and the datasets give no way to net that out without double-counting.

By borough

Brooklyn and the Bronx together account for 64.6% of every order in the city. That is a different map from construction: in the same twelve months Manhattan led permitted building work by a wide margin, and here it is third. The city intervenes where buildings are failing, not where they are busy.

Queens is the row worth pausing on. It has fewer orders than Manhattan but 57% more money attached to them — an average of $2,592 per order against Manhattan's $1,520. Fewer interventions, bigger ones.

What the work actually is

Open Market Orders only; fifteen trade categories in total, summing to $54,223,698. The four smallest — Article 7A work, miscellaneous, mould and storage — account for 57 orders between them.

Three out of every four orders are general construction, and they are cheap: $1,323 on average, which buys a door closer, a self-closing hinge, a patch of ceiling. This is the texture of the programme — thousands of small jobs an owner could have done for less than the city charged them for it.

Eighty-one jobs, a quarter of the money

Then there is demolition. 81 orders — three tenths of one percent of the total — carried $13.2 million, or 24% of everything the city spent. The average demolition order was $163,007, against $1,323 for general construction. The largest single order in the year was a demolition in Brooklyn at $978,968.

That is what the far end of this programme looks like. Not a repair at all: a building taken down because it could not be left standing, at a cost that lands as a lien on the lot. Six Article 7A orders — work at buildings placed under a court-appointed administrator — added a further $1.4 million across six jobs.

Lead paint is the second story

3,541 orders across both programmes were lead paint removal, carrying $8.85 million — the second largest category by both count and money. Lead work is expensive per job ($2,590 on average, twice general construction) and heavily regulated, and the city doing it means an owner did not, in a building where a child may live.

Two more categories are worth naming for what they say. 376 utility restorations: the city paying to have the gas or the electricity turned back on. 309 heating orders, at $4,175 apiece. Both are the definition of an essential service, and both are on this list because somebody had stopped providing one.

Where it concentrates

Emergency repair orders touched 195 of the city's neighborhoods, but not evenly. The ten busiest account for 19.6% of every order in the city; the twenty busiest account for 34%.

Open Market Orders, by the neighborhood field HPD publishes on each order.

Read that list as a map of older rental housing rather than of bad neighborhoods. These are the parts of the city with the most pre-war multi-family stock still in rental use, and the count follows the buildings. It says where the city has had to act, not who lives there.

What these numbers are not

• Not a ranking of landlords. No owner, company, contractor or person is named, counted or scored anywhere in this analysis. Every figure is a borough, a neighborhood or a category of work.
• Not the amount owners actually paid. The figures are the value of the work ordered. HPD adds an administrative fee on top when it bills, and some charges are paid, disputed or written off. Treat these as the cost of the work, not as collections.
• Not every repair the city touches. This covers two charge programmes. Other agencies do emergency work under other authorities and are not in these files.
• Not a judgement about any building. A charge attaches to the property, so orders on a building may predate its current owner entirely.

Method, so you can check it

• Datasets: HPD Open Market Order (OMO) Charges (mdbu-nrqn) and Handyman Work Order (HWO) Charges (sbnd-xujn), both on NYC Open Data.
• Window: omocreatedate and hwocreatedate from 2025-08-01 up to but not including 2026-08-01.
• Counting: one row is one order. This was checked rather than assumed — in this window count(*), count(distinct omonumber) and count(distinct omoid) are all 24,257, and the three equivalent counts for HWO are all 2,901. No de-duplication is needed.
• Money: omoawardamount for Open Market Orders and chargeamount for Handyman Work Orders. Both are populated on every row in the window. netchangeorders sums to exactly zero across the window, so no change orders adjust these totals.
• Borough is the boro field. The two files disagree on case — OMO writes "Brooklyn", HWO writes "BROOKLYN" — so they are folded before being added together.
• Neighborhood is the nta field HPD publishes on each order. Neighborhood figures are Open Market Orders only.
• Trades are the worktypegeneral code, expanded to words. Fifteen distinct codes appear in the window and their values sum to $54,223,698 — the OMO total, to the cent.
• Not used: the scope-description field on each order. It is free text written by contractors and it can name individual tenants, so no part of this analysis reads it.

Figures are frozen as computed on 7 August 2026 and will not move as HPD publishes more, so a number cited from this page is still the number when the link is followed. Where the site's data comes from generally is on data sources; how records are matched to buildings is on methodology. To see whether the city has done work at a specific address, search it free at Check a Building.

Analysis by Check a Building from public NYC Open Data. Free to quote or cite with a link. This is aggregate research about places and categories of work — it is not about any individual, owner or company, and it is not tenant screening. Sources: NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development — Open Market Order (OMO) Charges (mdbu-nrqn) and Handyman Work Order (HWO) Charges (sbnd-xujn). Computed 7 August 2026.