'My Whole Building Is Listed Twice': New Yorkers Caught in the City's Duplicate Address Crisis Speak Out

Josephine Reyes has been trying to get her Bushwick landlord cited for a broken boiler since February. The problem isn't that the city doesn't have a record of her building on Halsey Street — it's that the city has two records, with slightly different addresses, and neither one is resolving her complaint correctly. Every time the Department of Housing Preservation and Development logs her call, it lands on the wrong entry in the database and disappears into a digital void.

Reyes is not alone. Across Brooklyn, the Bronx and upper Manhattan, a growing number of tenants, small-business owners and community advocates are running into the same wall: duplicate image records in city property and permit databases that cause inspections to be misfiled, violations to go unrecorded and benefits to be denied. With the Adams administration under pressure to modernize legacy city IT systems — some of which date to the 1980s — the problem has become a live frustration for ordinary New Yorkers trying to access basic services.

A Bureaucratic Ghost in the Machine

The duplication issue stems from decades of piecemeal data entry across agencies that never shared a unified record system. When buildings are rezoned, subdivided, or reassigned a new tax lot, legacy systems at HPD, the Department of Buildings, and the city's Finance Department sometimes generate parallel entries rather than updating a single master record. The result is a kind of bureaucratic shadow image — a duplicate that absorbs calls, complaints and inspection orders while the real property sits untouched.

Mohamed Diallo runs a halal grocery at the corner of Jerome Avenue and East 183rd Street in the Bronx. He applied for a small-business commercial lease assistance grant through the city's Small Business Services office in March 2026, only to be told his storefront appeared twice in the property roll — once under his block and lot number, once under a slightly altered address inherited from a 2019 rezoning. SBS told him the discrepancy had to be resolved through Finance before any disbursement could proceed. Three months later, he is still waiting.

At Chhaya CDC, a Jackson Heights-based nonprofit that assists South Asian and Indo-Caribbean homeowners and small businesses in Queens, staff say they began flagging the duplicate-record problem formally in early 2025. The organization has helped clients navigate permit delays on Roosevelt Avenue and incorrect lien notices tied to ghost entries in the city's ACRIS real estate database. Staff there note that immigrant business owners are disproportionately affected because language barriers slow down the manual correction process, which requires submitting notarized documentation to multiple agencies separately.

What the Data Shows — and What the City Says

The city's own Office of Technology and Innovation acknowledged in its Fiscal Year 2025 annual report that interoperability gaps between legacy property databases remain an active remediation priority, though it did not specify a number of duplicate records outstanding. Housing advocates at the Community Service Society of New York estimated in a May 2026 policy brief that tens of thousands of individual property entries across HPD and DOB systems contain some form of conflicting identifier, though the society cautioned that a precise count is difficult without direct database access.

Renters in affected buildings face the most immediate harm. Under Local Law 97, buildings must file energy benchmarking data annually — and a property with a duplicated record can end up with neither entry meeting the filing threshold, effectively exempting a landlord from compliance by accident. The law carries penalties of up to $268 per metric ton of excess carbon emissions for buildings that miss benchmarks, but enforcement depends on clean database matches that duplicate records undermine.

For residents like Reyes in Bushwick, the practical advice from housing counselors at BronxWorks and Legal Aid's Brooklyn office has been consistent: file complaints through 311 and simultaneously follow up with written requests to HPD's Office of Enforcement and Neighborhood Services at 100 Gold Street in lower Manhattan, asking specifically that staff flag the entry for manual deduplication review. The process is slow — HPD says corrections can take 60 to 90 days — but it creates a paper trail. Advocates say that paper trail may matter if tenants eventually need to pursue landlords in Housing Court.

City Council Member Shahana Hanif, whose district covers parts of Brooklyn including Park Slope and Kensington, introduced a resolution in June 2026 calling on OTI to publish a public-facing dashboard tracking duplicate property record corrections. The resolution has been referred to the Committee on Technology. No hearing date has been scheduled.