Inspector Visits with No Heat Violations Given?

Once when I was in L/T court with a tenant who hadn’t paid rent for months, she started calling in no-heat complaints.  It’s a two family with one boiler and I live upstairs; how likely is it that her apt would have no heat?  So on inspection days, she just turned off the valves on the radiators in her apartment and the downstairs hallway.  The inspectors never even checked the valves, just wrote me up for no heat.  After they left, she opened the valves and her place was toasty.  Amazing.

fiordiligi

in Heating 13 years and 7 months ago

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ejalbk | 13 years and 7 months ago

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We have a rent-stablizied tenant that is constantly calling NYC to send out a heating inspector. The inspectors have probably been in the building 15-20 times in the past three years and have never once found a heating violation. Of course it is possible that one day they will for any of a number of reasons. Is there any publically available record of heat complaints at a building along with a record of the number of times NO violations were found? I know there are heavy penalties for heating violations, but you’d hope that if an inspector was at the building 15 times and only found a violation once that a judge would take that into consideration in deciding whether to impose a fine and how big of a fine to levy. We do have a yellow inspection card but it doesn’t state when no violation was found and I don’t know whether a judge can pull up a copy of those visits anyway.

starfish11040 | 13 years and 7 months ago

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15-20 times with no violation? Isn’t there a way of filing a harassment complaint against a tenant? I know it’s very easy the other way around.

ejalbk | 13 years and 7 months ago

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Although we know who the tenant is, there is no proof as they never complain about a specific apartment it’s always “building is without heat”. In addition, it’s not really harassment as it’s no skin off our backs (unless of course an inspector comes on a day when for some reason an apartment is 65 degrees during the day and he writes a violation). OTOH, it is taxpayer harassment as the salaries of these inspectors are paid by NYC taxpayers.

bkmatthew | 13 years and 7 months ago

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If the tenant is complaining to 311 it becomes a HPD complaint and those are logged here http://167.153.4.71/hpdonline/. The complainant’s apartment number is logged. If I was looking to buy or rent an apartment, I’d check out the building history. I would try to interpret the results. A lot of complaints over a long period, could mean that the landlord is not maintaining the building (if violations are regularly issued), or it could mean that the tenants are involved in a vigilante action against the landlord (if no/few violations. A single tenant filing multiple complaints might indicate a problem with one apartment (if violations are regularly issued) , or a fruit loop tenant (if no/few violations are issued).