The worst landlord in New York might own one building

Raw violation counts crown the biggest portfolios. Divide by apartments and a different city appears: the citywide record runs about 1.3 open violations per residential unit, the median registered portfolio holds 0.5, and the leader is a single 25-unit Bronx building carrying 27.4 open violations per apartment, a building that ranks only 129th by raw count.

Every worst-landlord list runs on the same arithmetic: count the violations, sort descending. Our own worst landlords ranking does it too, and by that math the top of the list is dominated by whoever owns the most apartments. Size is doing most of the work.

Dividing by apartments asks a different question: not who has accumulated the most paper, but where the record is most concentrated per household. The two questions produce two different cities.

What raw counts measure

Sorted by open records alone, the top of the registered-owner table is instructive mostly for what it is not. First place belongs to the City of New York itself, with 8,307 open records across 62 buildings it holds directly. Third is Neighborhood Restore HDFC, the nonprofit the city routes tax-foreclosed buildings through. Fourth is Riverbay Corporation, which runs Co-op City, the largest housing cooperative in the country.

Riverbay is the clearest case of the size effect. Its 4,933 open records are spread over 15,372 units: 0.3 per apartment, a quarter of the citywide average. The Parkchester South condominium tells the same story at 0.4 per unit. A tenant reading the raw list would conclude these are among the worst places to live in New York. The per-unit column says they are among the most ordinary.

What per-unit measures

Restrict the field to registered organizational portfolios with at least 20 residential units and at least 200 open records in buildings where units are known, and rank by open records per unit:

Nine of the ten are one- or two-building companies. None of the nine appears anywhere near the top of a raw-count list; they sit at ranks 59 through 230, invisible behind portfolios a hundred times their size. The full top 50 is in the downloadable data below.

The leader carries 27.4 open records per apartment. For scale: that is 58 times the median portfolio and 21 times the citywide rate. A building like that is not a landlord having a bad quarter. It is an address where the enforcement record has effectively replaced the maintenance record.

The one big portfolio on both lists

Neighborhood Restore HDFC is the exception that proves the method, appearing third by raw count and tenth per unit. It is not a conventional landlord: it is the nonprofit conduit the city uses to take over tax-foreclosed and distressed buildings, which means it inherits the record of every building it absorbs, by design. Its position on both lists is a reminder that a ranking is a starting point for reading a record, not a verdict on its own. The same caution applies to every row: an open record is an unresolved city filing, and the building pages behind each name show what those filings actually are, how severe, and how old.

Why the small ones stay invisible

Per-unit concentration is not a novelty statistic. Open hazardous violations per unit is the arithmetic HPD itself runs to select buildings for the Alternative Enforcement Program, its most aggressive track, and our guide to the program covers what selection triggers. What the program's building-level lens and the public's portfolio-level lists both miss is the middle case this post measures: a small company whose one building is in collapse ranks nowhere on any raw list, while a giant co-op with a fraction of its concentration ranks near the top.

Every building and landlord page on this site now shows open records per unit next to the raw count, with the citywide average for comparison, so both readings of any record are one click away.

Methodology

Portfolio figures come from our registered-owner portfolio snapshot, which groups buildings by the owner entities on HPD multiple-dwelling registrations. Only organizations are ranked; HPD lists individual officers on the same registrations, and we do not rank private individuals. Open records count every currently open enforcement entry we hold for a building across HPD violations, DOB violations and complaints, OATH cases with balances, and the other sources listed on our data page; they are not HPD violations alone.

Residential unit counts come from PLUTO. PLUTO records units at the tax-lot level and copies the figure onto every building on the lot, so portfolio unit totals count each lot once at its maximum recorded value; summing per building would multiply shared lots (Co-op City's 75 buildings would sum to roughly 676,000 units). The per-unit numerator counts open records only in buildings with a known unit count, so both sides of the division describe the same buildings.

The ranked table applies two floors: at least 20 residential units and at least 200 open records in unit-known buildings. Without floors, a two-unit house with 20 filings would lead every list. The citywide 1.3 figure divides 4.65 million open records in the 743,593 buildings with known units by 3.6 million lot-deduplicated units; buildings with no recorded units (most one- and two-family homes and non-residential stock) are outside it. Figures were computed on September 3, 2026 and are frozen with this post; the live pages they link to keep moving.