Between August 18 and August 27, Buildings Department inspectors wrote 26 separate violations across the city for one offense: unlawfully continuing work while on notice of a stop-work order. Every one is a Class 1 charge at $10,000 or $25,000. Six hit the $25,000 ceiling. Seventeen of the 26 are in Brooklyn.

The standout is a single building at 75 South 8th Street in Williamsburg. Eleven violations in eight days, $125,000 in penalties — four of them $25,000 Class 1 charges, one marked aggravated. Among them, a $5,000 violation states the posted stop-work order was removed from the building's main entry door. The rest of the docket at that address, as recorded: unpermitted AC condensers, electrical work, a hanging scaffold, and two masonry balconies attached to the facade without permits.

At 155 Tompkins Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, records show framing work continuing on the third floor of a building under both a full vacate order and a partial stop-work order — twice in three days, the second violation marked Aggravated Level 1 at $25,000.

Every one of these charges is active and headed to hearings. But the arithmetic already talks: a stop-work order costs nothing to obey and $10,000 to $25,000 per inspection to ignore — and the department demonstrably re-inspects. Add the new rule this paper has covered on the shed side of enforcement, where unpaid penalties now block permit renewals, and defiance stops being a cost of doing business. It becomes a way of losing the building.