Unresolved NYC Housing Violations Increase 4% in October: Report
Renters are filing complaints that go unaddressed, with the backlog rising
By Amanda Schiavo November 11, 2026 9:38 am
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New Yorkers are used to screaming into the void when it comes to getting things fixed in their apartments, but that void has only grown deeper over the last 12 months.
The backlog of unresolved tenant complaints in New York City’s rental apartments — such as pest control, heat and hot water issues, as well as garbage management — grew by 3.9 percent in October on a year-over-year basis, according to research by Openigloo, a rental market transparency and apartment-hunting platform.
The data found that 75.2 percent of open violations across the five boroughs have gone unresolved for more than a year. That’s a rise of 0.6 percentage points year-over-year in October, an increase OpenIgloo credited largely to a combination of issues simply going unfixed and a shortage of city inspectors who can go out and validate whether something has been repaired.
“We saw, October over October, a 40 percent rise in heat and hot water complaints,” Allia Mohamed, CEO and co-founder of OpenIgloo, told Commercial Observer. “This is a concerning figure and a reflection of aging infrastructure in New York City. New York City has very old buildings, and it is going to require substantial investment on the infrastructure side to really see these heat and hot water complaints come down.”
On a year-over-year basis in October, open violations per unit grew by 3.4 percent in the Bronx, 3.5 percent in Brooklyn, 6 percent in Staten Island, and 0.6 percent in Manhattan. Queens was the only borough to see a dip in its number of open violations, decreasing by 2 percent.
OpenIgloo found that the majority of the violations happen in prewar buildings and properties with a high percentage of rent-stabilized units.
“We can pinpoint the buildings that are notorious for the same complaints over and over and over again. And that is clearly a landlord or management company that is deploying Band-Aid type solutions versus making more substantial improvements,” Mohamed said. “I don’t want to undermine the economic reality as well. It’s really expensive to make these structural changes, particularly in prewar buildings in New York City.”
Amanda Schiavo can be reached at aschiavo@commercialobserver.com.
