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During the most recent fiscal year, more New Yorkers reported not having heat in their apartments than any time on record. Here’s how to get help if your landlord won’t turn up the thermostat this “heat season,” which kicks off Oct. 1.
More New Yorkers than ever reported sleeping in the cold last year, city data suggests.
The Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) responded to a record 161,773 unique heat and hot water problems in the 12 months that ended last June, according to the Mayor’s Management Report released in mid-September.
Heat and hot water violations were up 12 percent over the previous fiscal year, and 60 percent since 2016. Other housing code problems went up just 2 percent last fiscal year.
The report’s release came just before the start of the city’s “heat season,” which stretches from Oct. 1 to May 31, when landlords are legally required to keep apartments at 62 degrees during the night and 68 degrees during the day.
“People will work with a lot of other repairs,” said Andrea Shapiro, director of program and advocacy at the Met Council on Housing. “But heat and hot water [problems] get to people very fast. Especially if they have children.”
Just complaints for heat alone—excluding hot water—reached 250,000 between July 2024 and June 2025, according to a City Limits analysis.
That’s more than double the number of complaints in 2016.
More complaints, a spokesperson for HPD said, could also just mean that tenant education efforts are working and more tenants are aware of the tools and resources they can use.
It’s not just that more New Yorkers have called in problems over the past few years—HPD has found more problems. The agency issued over 9,000 violations for serious heat deficiencies in the past two fiscal years, city data shows. In the previous eight years, they issued an average of about 4,000 a year.
A spokesperson for HPD said that the number of heat violations issued decreased 2 percent this year, and hot water violations increased 7 percent.
How to get help
If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of tenants who have trouble with their heat each year, here’s how you can get help.
- Try contacting the owner, manager, or super. Contacting the manager directly is an important first step. Make sure to document the fact that you reached out by saving your call records, emails, or texts. The most airtight way to contact your landlord is by certified mail, experts say, which can provide proof they received it.
If you live in NYCHA housing, you can call the customer contact center at (718) 707-7771 or use the MyNYCHA app. - Collect evidence of the temperature. You can buy a thermometer for low cost at a local hardware or corner store. Start logging the temperature and make sure to note the exact day and time of your temperature reading. It’s a good idea to note the temperature multiple times during the day and at night.
Once you have a log of the temperature, it might be a good idea to reach out to your owner again, sending them a letter by certified mail and saving a copy for yourself. - Contact 311 through the phone, the online portal, or the app. When you make a 311 report, HPD will send an inspector out to your apartment. There is no way to know exactly when the inspector will come, though a spokesperson for HPD says that they prioritize heat and hot water complaints and typically respond within less than a few days. In extreme cases, HPD will fix the problem themselves, then bill the landlord.
Note that when you call 311, your landlord will be notified of the complaint. If your neighbors also have no heat, sending in multiple complaints can help bring attention to your building. When the HPD inspector comes they can issue a violation. You can see the open violations as well as past violations for your building on HPD online. - Consider a lawsuit if the problem persists after HPD has issued a violation. You can file an “HP Action” by going to court in your borough (bring your documented evidence and the letter you sent your landlord). An HP Action costs $45 to file, but you can ask the judge to waive that fee.
The court clerk will give you paperwork for a complaint that you need to fill out and deliver to your landlord. Make sure to send the papers by certified mail, and keep the receipt. The nonprofit Housing Court Answers has a helpful Q&A if you are considering taking your landlord to court.
Most importantly, says Shapiro, “you don’t need to wait to do anything.” Some tenants, Shapiro says, can be intimidated to reach out to their landlord. She said knowing your rights can help: even if you’re behind on rent, you are still entitled to heat and protected from threats and harassment.
If you need more information, check out these helpful guides from JustFix and THE CITY. The Met Council also offers a tenants’ rights hotline which you can call at 212-979-0611.
Where are heat violations most present?
The burden of going without heat is not spread evenly throughout New York City. Problems tend to pop up in the same neighborhoods year after year.
A City Limits analysis shows that recent complaints of no heat were concentrated in Harlem, The Bronx, and Central Brooklyn.
Daniel Neill, a NYU professor and researcher, found that poorer neighborhoods tended to have more problems. “Neighborhoods with lower income tend to be ones with lower end buildings where perhaps the landlords are not taking as good care of them,” he said.
Last year, City Limits reported that housing maintenance code violations were more likely to be concentrated in those same neighborhoods. Those areas also tend to have more people of color, and have an older stock of housing.
Met Council’s Shapiro said that a lot of the heat and hot water problems they see are in areas of the city like Washington Heights and Inwood, where there is a lot of older, rent stabilized housing. Because rent stabilized tenants have capped rent increases, they may be more likely to call in a complaint than market-rate tenants who fear retaliation, she suggested.
Property owners previously pointed to physical distress in the stock of rent stabilized housing in the city, where landlords sometimes defer maintenance, saying they cannot keep up with rising costs—a debate reignited by mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s promise to freeze rents in rent stabilized buildings for four years, which landlords claim will exacerbate the problem.
Earlier this year, New York City’s Comptroller Brad Lander found that many heat issues were chronic—and that even as HPD hired more inspectors, some buildings were still falling through the cracks.
City Limits reported that in those buildings, tenants went months without working heat, frustrated by repairs requests that went unanswered.
Neill cautioned that in order to issue a violation, there needs to be a complaint. His research suggested that neighborhoods with more older folks and more people with limited English proficiency were less likely to report a heat and hot water problem.
Knowing where to get help is a big part of that. “These are serious quality of life issues, and so it’s really important that when problems occur, people actually have what they need to make sure that those problems are fixed,” said Neill.
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