The Buildings Cited for Pests Year After Year
Of 37,568 New York buildings cited for roaches or mice between 2021 and 2025, the 31 per cent cited in three or more separate years account for 78.3 per cent of all pest violations. There were 3,590 buildings cited in every one of the five years, and the worst single building drew 450 violations. Pest enforcement is not spread across the housing stock; it is concentrated in a fraction of it that never clears.
A violation issued once is an incident. A violation issued in five consecutive years is a description of how a building is run. The New York housing violation record covers enough years to tell the two apart, and the split is more lopsided than the usual framing of a citywide pest problem suggests.
The concentration
| Years cited | Buildings | Share of buildings |
|---|---|---|
| 1 of 5 | 18,412 | 49.0% |
| 2 of 5 | 7,526 | 20.0% |
| 3 of 5 | 4,582 | 12.2% |
| 4 of 5 | 3,458 | 9.2% |
| 5 of 5 | 3,590 | 9.6% |
Buildings with at least one roach or mouse violation between 2021 and 2025, grouped by how many separate calendar years they were cited in. Total 37,568 buildings and 313,497 violations.
Half the buildings appear once and never again. At the other end, 3,590 buildings were cited in all five years, more than the number cited in exactly four. That is not the shape of a problem being worked through. It is a group of buildings for which enforcement is a recurring annual event rather than a corrective one.
Together, the 11,630 buildings cited in three or more years produced 245,391 of the 313,497 violations, 78.3 per cent. The concentration is steeper than the building count alone implies, because repeatedly cited buildings also carry more violations each time they are cited.
The extreme tail
The most-cited single building accumulated 450 roach and mouse violations over the five years. The next four recorded 405, 377, 358 and 297. For context, a violation is issued per dwelling unit per condition, so a large building inspected thoroughly can generate dozens at once. These are buildings where inspectors are finding the same conditions across most of the units, repeatedly.
The practical point for anyone working in multifamily is that a handful of addresses carry a caseload equivalent to hundreds of ordinary buildings, and they are identifiable in public data before anyone knocks on a door.
Why the same buildings keep failing
The data does not explain itself, so this section is inference rather than finding. Three explanations are consistent with what we can see.
Treatment without exclusion. A unit-by-unit response to a building-wide infestation moves the problem rather than ending it. Roaches and mice travel through shared risers, voids and wall cavities, and a building treated one complaining unit at a time will present again.
The compliance cycle rewards the paperwork, not the outcome. Our analysis of how long violations stay open found a median of 102 days to clearance, with very little clearing quickly and a large share resolved by certification. A building can clear its violations each year without the underlying conditions changing.
Capital conditions rather than pest conditions. Gaps around pipe penetrations, failed door sweeps, defective refuse rooms and structural moisture are repair problems with repair budgets. A pest contract cannot fix them, and a building that will not fund them will produce violations indefinitely.
What operators should take from this
- The repeat list is public. Buildings cited in three or more consecutive years are identifiable from open data, and they are the addresses where a pest problem is structural rather than incidental.
- Price the building, not the unit. Winning a repeat-violation building on a per-unit treatment price is how a contract becomes unprofitable, because the work that would end the problem is not in the scope.
- Put exclusion and reporting in the proposal. Documented conditions give an owner the evidence to fund capital work and give you the record that the failure was not the treatment. Our guidance on apartment and condo work and on winning commercial contracts covers how this is structured.
- Expect access to be the constraint. Access failures are a recorded reason violations stall, and in a building with a hundred units a treatment programme that reaches sixty of them is not a treatment programme.
How we did this
We pulled every housing maintenance code violation whose description references roaches or mice, with an inspection date between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025, and grouped them by the building identifier assigned in the dataset. For each building we counted the distinct calendar years in which it received at least one such violation, and the total number of violations across the period.
Using distinct years rather than raw counts is deliberate. It prevents one intensive inspection of a large building from registering as a persistent problem, and it makes a small building cited every year visible next to a large one cited once.
Limits worth stating. Buildings vary enormously in size, and we have not normalised by unit count, so large buildings are over-represented among high-violation addresses. The dataset covers buildings subject to housing maintenance code enforcement, which excludes owner-occupied homes and most small properties. And a building appearing once may simply not have been inspected again.
Frequently asked questions
How many buildings are repeatedly cited for pests?
In New York, 11,630 buildings were cited for roaches or mice in three or more separate years between 2021 and 2025, out of 37,568 cited at all. That is 31 per cent of cited buildings, and they account for 78.3 per cent of the 313,497 pest violations issued in the period.
Do pest violations mean a building is badly run?
A single violation does not, since half of all cited buildings appear only once in five years. A building cited in every one of the five years is a different case, and 3,590 buildings fall into that group. Persistent citation generally points to shared structural conditions rather than to any one unit or tenant.
How can I check a building’s pest violation history?
New York publishes housing maintenance code violations as open data with the building identifier, issue date, status and description, and the city also provides a building lookup by address. Filtering on descriptions referencing roaches or mice, then counting distinct years, is what separates a one-off from a pattern.
Why does the same building keep getting pest violations?
The data cannot say directly, but three explanations fit the pattern: treatment applied unit by unit while the population moves through shared voids and risers, a compliance process that can be satisfied by certification without conditions changing, and underlying repair problems such as pipe penetrations and refuse room defects that a pest contract cannot fix.
Sources
- NYC Open Data, Housing Maintenance Code Violations, roach and mouse violations 2021 to 2025. data.cityofnewyork.us
- Analysis by The Pest Control Brief, September 2026.
