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Department of Neighborhoods

Submitting a Public Information Request to the Department of Neighborhoods

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If you have questions about a violation and do not need documents, call our Inspections and Public Service Call Center at 832.394.0600.

Submitting your request

The fastest way to get a response to your open records request is to submit it to our GovQA Public Information Request Center. Public information requests must be submitted in writing and must ask for information that is already in existence. The Texas Public Information Act does not require the City to create new information, compile data, do legal research, or answer questions. A request should be sent to the City department that has the information. A request sent by fax or email must be sent to the correct department.

Once you submit it through the portal, the request is considered received by the City of Houston and we will respond within 10 business days. We respond to all requests in the order they are received. For more information about submitting public information requests in the City of Houston, go to www.houstontx.gov/pia.html.

Common TPIA requests for the Department of Neighborhoods include:

  • Code violations report
    • We run a report for code violations at the end of each month and have the information through the end of previous month readily available to send. If you want a report that includes dates from the current month then our analyst will need to run that report and there will be labor charges of $15/hour included in your request.
  • Case report and photos
    • The case report includes all of the information about the inspection including the dates, violations and inspector’s notes.

Information we will need to process your request:

  • The address of the property or the case number
  • If you are searching for more than one case on a property, or if you don’t have a case number, then we will need a date range to perform a search.

If you do not include enough information to perform a search, then we will need to request clarification and the 10-business day count will begin again when we receive your response.

Payment

Payment can be easily made online in the Public Information Request Center. There are labor charges of $15/hour for open records requests. If a request requires more than $100 of labor charges, we will require a deposit of 50% before we begin compiling your records.