On February 8, 2026, HPD expanded its Alternative Enforcement Program to 250 buildings covering 7,038 units. Between them, those buildings carry nearly 55,000 open violations and owe $4.5 million in unpaid fines. The message from the new administration is unambiguous: enforcement is tightening, and the gap between compliant and non-compliant owners is widening fast.
What the AEP actually means
When a building lands on the AEP list, it faces stricter inspection cycles, mandatory repair timelines, and city-performed repairs billed back to the owner — at the city's rates, which are not cheap. HPD's litigation unit is already in court against the owners of 138 of those 250 buildings. The agency recently secured a $2.1 million settlement with A&E Real Estate, the largest in the anti-harassment unit's history.
The second crackdown: the Certification Watchlist
Even more aggressive is HPD's 2026 Certification Watchlist, which targets 100 buildings where landlords filed roughly 7,500 false certifications claiming they'd corrected over 20,000 hazardous violations. They hadn't. HPD is treating these as deliberate fraud, not paperwork errors — which means mandatory re-inspections, escalated penalties, and potential housing court action for everyone on the list.
The fines that are actually being collected
Class C (immediately hazardous) violations carry $250 to $1,000 per day past the correction deadline. Class B (hazardous) violations run $25 to $100 daily. Work-without-permit violations can reach $2,500 to $25,000, and illegal conversions can exceed $25,000. The math is brutal: a single ignored Class C violation can rack up $30,000 a month while you're not looking.
Why owners end up on these lists
It's almost never because the owner doesn't care. It's because violations come from multiple agencies, on different timelines, with different correction protocols, and they pile up. An owner with five buildings and ten violations across DOB, HPD, FDNY, and DEP can lose track of which deadline is next, which has been certified, which the city accepts as cured, and which is still accruing fines. By the time anyone notices, the building is on a list.
How to stay off the list
Three things. First, real-time monitoring across every agency, not just the one that emailed you most recently. Second, certifications that are real — meaning the work was actually done and the proof is filed correctly the first time. False certifications used to be a paperwork gray area; in 2026, they're a fraud charge waiting to happen. Third, organized records. When HPD shows up to re-inspect, the buildings that come out clean are the ones whose owners can produce documentation showing every certification was backed by actual completed work, with photos, invoices, and contractor sign-offs ready on request.
Bottom line
The 2026 enforcement environment doesn't tolerate "I'll get to it." It rewards owners who treat compliance as a routine operational function and punishes everyone else. That's exactly the work we do — monitoring every agency in real time, executing the corrections, filing the certifications, and keeping the records — so your buildings stay off every list except your own.