When a Buildings Department summons reaches the city's administrative court and the respondent does not appear, the result is a default: the charges are sustained as written, and the full penalty lands. In the last two weeks of August, four respondents defaulted their way to a combined $340,000 — and the case records read like a tour of the city's illegal-conversion economy.

The largest: $112,530 against the owner of a two-family house on Shore Avenue in Queens, across five summonses heard together. Four charge the house was cut into single-room occupancies — including a cellar apartment — contrary to its certificate of occupancy, at $25,000 each. The fifth records the cellar conversion and a 20-by-30-foot backyard structure with full partitions and a kitchen, built without permits.

At 508 9th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, $88,750 was imposed — and, unusually for a default, the record shows every dollar paid. The lead charge, $57,500, is a daily-accruing penalty for using a residential building for transient stays. The companions: no required means of egress on every floor, no fire alarm for transient use, no sprinklers where required. Fire-safety counts, stacked on a building the record says was being rented short-term.

In the Garment District, $62,500 landed on a respondent for converting a third floor in a manufacturing district to residential use — plumbing, waste line, shower and kitchen installed without permits — plus a $25,000 count stating an active stop-work order, posted since February 2025, was removed from the front entry. And on Staten Island, seven defaulted summonses at one Sophia Lane property totaled $76,750: an unpermitted 900-square-foot enlargement under a full stop-work order, a structurally altered retaining wall, terraces with 10-foot drops and no railings, and a partial vacate-order sticker peeled off the door.

The pattern in all four files is the same: the construction happened without permits, the orders went up, and when the hearing date came, nobody stood up to answer. Defaults are how the maximum sticks. For the legitimate trade, these records are the competition's price sheet — and the reason the licensed, permitted way keeps winning on math, not just principle.