Four agencies keep this record and none of them keys it the same way. Getting that straight is most of reading a New York report.
Two ids, and they are not interchangeable
- BBL is the tax lot: borough, block, lot. The Department of Finance assesses it and City Planning describes it. Money and zoning are BBL facts.
- BIN is the building. One lot can carry several. Violations are filed against the building, not the lot.
So the permit count and the violation count on one report are answering slightly different questions, and are not expected to match. That is the record being precise rather than the report being wrong.
Who writes what down
- Department of City Planning publishes PLUTO: 858,284 tax lots with the assessment, the year built, the units, the floor area and the zoning.
- Department of Buildings publishes permits (3,990,409 rows) and its own violations (2,476,614), both about the structure.
- Housing Preservation and Development publishes housing maintenance violations, graded by how serious the city judged the condition.
- 311 publishes what residents reported, which is not the same as what anyone found.
A complaint is not a finding
311 records what somebody said before an inspector has been. A violation records what an inspector wrote down. The report counts them separately and never adds them, because a building with many complaints and no violations is telling you something different from the reverse.
Counts run 12 September 2026.