BUILDING GRADES
Every building.
One letter.
One letter per building, and it describes the building now. A cumulative record sets the floor, sustained clean time lifts it, and anything still active against the building holds it down. It is the same letter the building’s own report and the 3D map show — full per-building detail is one click away.
METHODOLOGY
How the grade is computed.
The grade is built in three moves, and the order matters.
- A base letter from the building’s cumulative record — HPD violations, Class C violations and ECB fines, each measured per 100 units so a 400-unit tower is not punished for being large. This part is deliberately historical. It caps at D, and it is a floor rather than a verdict.
- A clean-time ladder that lifts the floor. One year with nothing new reaches C, two years reaches B, three years reaches A. Clean means nothing new on any axis: no new HPD violation of any class, no new Class C, no new material ECB penalty. One fresh event of any kind resets the clock. Three years is the rung that reaches A because three years outlasts a board term — an A means the building stayed clean through a change in the people running it.
- An active-condition cap. Anything currently live against the building — an LL97 emissions overage, an open enforcement trigger — caps the ladder at B however long the record has been quiet. A is reserved for buildings with nothing active against them at all.
Two things are handled carefully, because getting them wrong is how a grade misleads. A paid ECB penalty under $500 is an administrative ticket and is not scored; unpaid at any amount is scored, because a balance means it was never resolved. And a dismissed violation is the city withdrawing, not the owner curing — it stays on the record and is still shown, but it is excluded from cure-time statistics, because timing a dismissal would credit a repair that never happened.
0 of these buildings currently sit above their cumulative floor on sustained clean time, and 0 are held at B or below by something still active. For the full model see the scoring methodology.
THE 25 LOWEST GRADES
The bottom of the ladder.
The lowest letters in the catalogue, worst first. The base column is the building’s cumulative floor: where it differs from the grade, the difference is what is currently active against the building rather than what is in its history.
| Rank | Grade | Building | Address | Borough | Managing Agent | Base |
|---|
THE 25 HIGHEST GRADES
The top of the ladder.
The highest letters in the catalogue. A high grade is not an endorsement: it means sustained clean time on the public record with nothing currently active, which is a statement about documents rather than about the building’s plumbing. Clean is how long that has held.
| Rank | Grade | Building | Address | Borough | Managing Agent | Clean |
|---|
DON'T SEE YOUR BUILDING?
0 buildings carry a letter so far.
A grade needs inputs — ECB penalties and balances, litigation, LL97 intensity, vacate orders, and the violation history the clean-time ladder is measured against — that have been collected only for buildings that have been through the audit pipeline. The rest are not graded, and they are not being called good: they have not been looked at. The master list of all 15,108 buildings is browseable now, and the 3D map shows the same letters in its grade mode, with every ungraded building painted as ungraded rather than guessed at.
Want yours next? Email the project with the BBL or address.