The New York City Comptroller’s Office recently released its 2025 Turn Up the Heat report. “Heat Season” as defined in the city’s Administrative Code falls between Oct. 1 and May 31, when owners are required to provide a minimum indoor temperature of at least 68 degrees during the day and 62 degrees at night. When an owner fails to provide adequate heat, tenants can call 311 to initiate enforcement from HPD. 

The NYC Comptroller’s Office first published an analysis of heat code enforcement in 2023 following the tragic fire at the Twin Parks development in the Bronx in January 2022. At the time, tenants at Twin Parks resorted to using dangerous space heaters that sparked the blaze, ultimately killing 17 New Yorkers. According to this update, since the Comptroller’s January 2023 report was issued, there have been approximately 50 fires caused by space heaters between 2022 and 2024.

Since the release of the previous Turn Up the Heat report, several actions have been taken to improve heat code enforcement and tenant protections: 

• HPD hired 100 new inspectors across Fiscal Years 2023 and 2024, which helped reduce inspection wait times and modestly increased the number of violations issued. 
• On the legislative front, the New York State enacted the “Good Cause Eviction” law in April 2024, granting tenants new legal protections against unjustified evictions. This potentially encourages more tenants to report housing issues without fear of retaliation. 
• Additionally, the City Council passed Local Law 70 of 2023 to expand the Heat Sensor Program, enabling more buildings with persistent heat issues to be monitored; and  
• Local Law 71 of 2023 established a “Certification Watchlist,” publicly identifying buildings where owners have falsely certified repairs, adding a new layer of accountability for chronic code violators.

Persistent Heat Issues in Same Buildings

Generally, the report finds that during the 2022, 2023, and 2024 heat seasons, tenants made an average of 203,920 heat code complaints per year, which is a 17.3 percent average annual increase from the 2017–2021 heat seasons. Also, only approximately 3 percent of all heat-related complaints between 2017–2024 led to HPD inspectors issuing violations. The number has grown slightly in the most recent heat seasons, to a peak of 4.5 percent of complaints becoming violations in the 2023 heat season.

The report highlights that a subset of buildings continues to have heat issues year after year. The comptroller’s 2023 report found that there are 1,283 buildings in New York City in which tenants complained of lack of heat more than five times each heat season between 2017 and 2021. And since then, approximately 70 percent, or 901 of those 1,283 buildings, remain on the list. 

This indicates that over seven years, tenants in these 901 buildings have continued to live without adequate heat. And 20 percent of those buildings have had no intervention from HPD for the entire seven-year period from 2017–2024. These properties, mostly clustered in the Bronx, bear much of the report’s criticism, but the statistics also raise serious questions about how consistently HPD is deploying its enforcement tools.

Prior and Additional Recommendations

The 2023 report outlines a series of recommendations for improving the code enforcement around heat issues. According to this update, the recommendations that remain to be implemented include:

• Using data and technology to inform and prioritize inspections with a focus on buildings with persistent heat complaints;
• Conducting comprehensive site inspections and identifying owners’ willingness to comply;
• Expanding proactive code enforcement and targeted escalation; and
• Expanding tenants’ rights and education

The following new recommendations from the latest report focus on ways to address the needs of tenants living in buildings with the most chronic and severe heat issues.

7A program. The comptroller calls for expanding the use of the 7A program to appoint administrators to operate buildings where conditions are dangerous to a tenants’ life and safety. The 7A program enables HPD to appoint an administrator to operate a building where conditions are dangerous to a tenants’ life and safety. The administrators take over rent collection and can use those rents to make necessary repairs.

Neighborhood Pillars program. The report recommends immediately relaunching the Neighborhood Pillars program to enable non-profits to acquire and rehabilitate buildings with chronic and persistent heat issues. Launched in 2018, the program’s budget was entirely slashed in 2020 in the wake of COVID-19 budget cuts. And, as of February 2025, the city has yet to formally “relaunch” the program. 

Intro. 1063-2024 of the Housing Rescue and Resident Protection Act. The report additionally recommends the passage of this legislation which would allow the city to foreclose on unregulated properties and protect tenants. Council Member Pierina Sanchez introduced the Housing Rescue and Resident Protection Act in 2024.