By the usual measures, Greenwich Village is one of the cleanest neighborhoods in Manhattan. Nearly every building we track there holds an accountability Grade A on open HPD violations, and 311 complaint counts are low. But HPD complaints and health-department rat inspections are two different datasets — and in the Village, they disagree.
Grade A on paper, rats in the record
Take 10 Sullivan Street, a 22-unit building. It carries a Grade A and has just one HPD complaint on record. But pull its DOHMH inspection history and the picture changes: the building has failed rodent inspections for rat activity 18 times, most recently in January 2025. None of that shows up in the 311 data a renter would normally check.
It isn’t alone. 154 West 14th Street has 12 failed rat-activity inspections, the most recent in September 2024 — again, against an almost spotless HPD record. These are buildings that look pristine if you only read one dataset.
Some buildings turned it around
The rat inspections cut both ways — they also show buildings that fixed the problem. 128 Mott Street failed for rat activity three times years ago, but its recent inspections have passed, most recently in December 2025. 27 Wooster Street tells a similar story — its rat-activity failures date back a decade, and recent visits pass. A single inspection result means little; the trend over time is what matters.
Where residents did complain
One Village address bucks the pattern in the other direction. 55 Fifth Avenue has eight 311 complaints — every one of them for pests. When tenants file, it lands in the HPD data; when they don’t, the DOHMH inspector’s record is the only trace. Even the neighborhood’s busiest building for complaints, 102 Charlton Street with 27 complaints, still holds a Grade A — while quieter addresses like 177 Bleecker Street stay clean across every dataset.
The takeaway
“Grade A” and “low complaints” don’t mean a building is problem-free — they mean nobody filed. Rat inspections, eviction filings, and violation history each catch something the others miss. Before you rent in the Village, check all of them. Look up any NYC address on 311 Tracker to see the full record in one place.