💵 $19.1M in Unpaid DOB Fines So Far in 2025

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and welcome to the 1 new subscriber of the Better Block Project, bringing our group to 120 members 🙌 

For those interested, the monthly Community Board 3 Meeting is this Monday, December 1st, at 1368 Fulton Street on the 1st Floor. It’s always a great place to connect with other individuals engaged in making positive change in the neighborhood. I’ll be there, so join if you can make it!

💵 $19.1M in Unpaid DOB Fines So Far in 2025

While Better Block’s efforts recently have been focused on improving the bus stop on Franklin and Fulton, our Tiger 🐯 Team on improving vacant properties has been working in the background to research policy ideas to ensure vacant and under-construction properties are better taken care of. Our volunteer team includes Jenny, Cristy, Omar and Andrew — thank you all so much for your efforts!

We’ve narrowed our focus to investigating property fines in NYC and the role they play as a deterrent for negligent behavior from landlords and developers.

🗺️ How did we get here?

Over the past 1.5 years we’ve been focused on improving several vacant and under-construction properties, including 1105 Fulton Street, 26 Jefferson, 73 Macon Street and 75 Macon Street. A common theme with these properties is many of them have fines to penalize negligent behavior, such as trash or improper construction, but those fines are more often then not unpaid. 1105 Fulton has fines for $4,970 for multiple construction safety violations over the past few months. 26 Jefferson has $100K+ in fines, dating back to 2023, all seemingly unpaid. For anyone who has walked by these properties, you’ve probably experienced the same feeling I have. They look the same. Both still sit in states of neglect, despite many inspections and many fines meant to deter this exact kind of behavior.

🔍️ Is this an isolated incident?

If fines are meant to be a deterrent, it’s clear they are not working in these two cases, so we dug deeper to understand if this was a broader issue in New York City. NYC Open Data has a robust dataset on how fines are paid in the city. As background, most fines are adjudicated through the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, or OATH for short. OATH handles fines for the Department of Buildings, Sanitation and Health and Mental Hygiene, some of the most common areas you might see a fine if you are a property owner. We looked at violations in 2025 to date to get a sense for what percentage of penalties imposed were actually being paid. All data below is in millions of dollars.

Of the $33.3M in penalties imposed in 2025, only $6.3M of these penalties have actually been paid. Note, this is specifically OATH hearings where “All Terms are Met”, meaning there is no penalty or compliance due. I filtered for these to focus on the hearings that were actually complete. An important other number to note is $19.1M, which is the remaining balance due for all of these fines.

It’s clear from this data that despite large fines being levied on buildings, when it comes to actual collections, that number is far less. The New York Times did a similar analysis and came to this exact conclusion back in 2018. They shared that HPD typically settles for less than 15 percent of the actual penalty in two thirds of cases.

So, why is this city doing this? When we all experience the day to day consequences of these derelict properties, why is the city letting negligent property owners off the hook? It’s not super clear. In the 2018 article, HPD cites the goal is to correct violations, not punish landlords. They also cite pushing for higher fines can prolong cases or make it difficult for these landlords to make the needed fixes.

While the spirit of this approach makes sense, the unfortunate consequence is the fines no longer seem to be an effective deterrent for repeat offenders. We experience this directly with the neglected state of 1105 Fulton and 26 Jefferson. While the fines are racked up, the properties still sit in a state of decay.

🧑‍⚖️ How we are thinking about policy solutions

To remedy this, our tiger team is actively thinking about ways to improve the status quo. The ideas we’re most excited about include:

1. Centralizing information about fines so it is clear what a property owner owes. Today, fines exist across many portals, and payment status is very ambiguous. We believe centralizing this information can give power to individuals and agencies to hold negligent owners more responsible

2. Adding more “teeth” to the collections of existing fines. It’s clear the process of collecting fines today allows for too many bad actors to get by without paying. We’re looking at ways to make the collections more stringent to ensure fines actually serve as a true deterrent

3. Protecting smaller residents and responsible owners. In too many cases, small family properties owners are levied very large fines, despite otherwise good behavior. We want to ensure any increased enforcement targets bad actors, not smaller property owners or larger property owners that are responsible

We’ve started to brainstorm these ideas with the offices of City Councilmember Rita Joseph, Sandy Nurse, and Chi Osse. We’re optimistic that there is momentum to actually get this legislation passed this year, as the new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has signaled he would like to collect and increase fines on negligent landlords and even potentially take over buildings from the worst landlords.

Our goal is to finalize a proposal over the next month, to aggressively market this proposal to City Councilmembers and Partner organizations early next year to see if we can get effective new policy passed. If you have any thoughts or feedback on this, please reply. We’d love your input as we continue to iterate on the best solution to fairly hold negligent property owners accountable.

That’s all for this week’s update. As a reminder, in two weeks on Saturday, December 13th we are going to have our 🗑️ Trash Clean Up on Fulton Street. It will be 10am-12pm, I hope you can make it. As always, if you like what we’re doing here at the Better Block Project, forward this to someone else you know who wants to do more work in the community!

See you next week,

David