DOB Certificate of Occupancy: NYC Building Use and Permits

New York City's Department of Buildings issued all Certificates of Occupancy from July 12, 2012, to March 2021. The dataset documents the legal use and permitted occupancy for buildings, confirming compliance with laws and resolution of violations. It includes property identifiers, job details, and geographic boundaries for each issued certificate.

Use Cases

• Tracking building permit history and occupancy changes using JOB_NUMBER, JOB_TYPE, and C_O_ISSUE_DATE.
• Mapping property compliance by geographic area using BBL, BIN, COMMUNITY_BOARD, and COUNCIL_DISTRICT.
• Analyzing dwelling unit counts for residential properties using PR_DWELLING_UNIT and EX_DWELLING_UNIT.
• Verifying address-specific certificate details for due diligence using STREET, NUMBER, LOT, and BLOCK.

Strengths

• Covers a defined time range of over eight years, from July 2012 to March 2021.
• Includes precise geospatial coordinates (LATITUDE, LONGITUDE) and multiple geographic boundary columns (Community Districts, Zip Codes, Census Tract).
• Contains detailed property and permit identifiers like BBL, BIN, and JOB_NUMBER for record linkage.

Limitations

• Data is not current; it stops in March 2021, with newer records in a separate dataset.
• Key metadata like row count, dataset size, license, and author are unavailable across all sources.
• The column 'LOCATION' appears multiple times with ambiguous suffixes (address, city), suggesting potential data structure issues.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofnewyork.us (NYC Department of Buildings)

Collection Method

Administrative records from the Department of Buildings' issuance process.

Time Range

2012-07-12 to 2021-03

Freshness

Last updated metadata dates are April 2026, but the actual data coverage ends in March 2021.

Geography

New York City, New York, USA