NYC says it is winning the battle against scaffolding. The data says otherwise
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New York City has declared war on ugly scaffolding. It turns out that scaffolding wins.
Last summer, Mayor Eric Adams announced a major campaign to tackle the Big Apple’s long-standing problem of curbside sheds—temporary structures erected beneath thousands of buildings across the five boroughs, ostensibly to protect passersby from falling debris. Unsightly green panel construction is a common sight for anyone living in or visiting New York, blocking important views, darkening streets, obscuring local business signs, and often lasting years at a time.
But more than a year into the mayor’s Get Sheds Down initiative, city data shows the fraud problem is worse than ever. By some measures it has gotten worse. As of Wednesday morning, an interactive map and spreadsheet run by the city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) identified 9,110 active shed permits. That’s actually 42 More there are number permits that were in effect at the beginning of last year, according to the spreadsheet archive.
In particular, the scourge hasn’t really moved in heavy Manhattan, where 4,132 permits were active as of Wednesday, or 45% of the total. The data also shows an increase in total square feet of scaffolding across the city: 2.1 million compared to 2.03 million in March last year.
The apparent lack of progress may surprise some New Yorkers who have listened to a group of local officials talk about their dedication to solving the problem in recent years. Across the city and state, vocal critics included everyone from various members of the City Council to lawmakers in Albany to New York’s building commissioner.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who is weighing the race for city control, unveiled his own plan for Shed the Shed as early as 2023 and has been vocal about the need for action. Levine’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
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Fixing slow motion
A dedicated webpage for the mayor’s Get Sheds Down initiative says the initiative “encourages property owners to expedite front-end renovations so construction sheds don’t sit for years on our streets.” This week, Adams even boasted in a press release about how the city has removed more than 250 longtime sheds since last summer, including the city’s longest-running one, which has been a scourge in the Harlem neighborhood for 21 years. And the nonprofit 34th Street Partnership said it saw growth in its midtown Manhattan neighborhood, listing 20 locations in June compared to 31 last summer.
But more efforts to tear down the old sheds are not enough to overcome the Sisyphean challenge of dealing with all the new ones springing up like mushrooms. (Data shows that valid permits dipped earlier this year but have since come in again.) As anyone who has seen a construction crew hauling steel poles to the side of the road and throwing them away can tell you, the process of erecting a shed only takes a few hours. Once awake, they tend to stay, even when no work is being done in the building.
Contacted for comment, the mayor’s office declined Fast company in DOB. In a statement, the Department said that it has actually been successful in fighting the perpetrators since last summer, but it also pointed out that it has limited resources that it can use since there is no City Council law.
“Since July of last year, the department has made significant progress in implementing the city’s Get Sheds Down program, which aims to force building owners to make long-overdue repairs so that sheds that have been standing on the side of the road for a long time come down quickly, while also improving the construction of the necessary sheds so that, when they go up, they do not come down again disrupt the pedestrian experience,” said Andrew Rudansky, DOB press secretary. Fast company. “While we have already begun implementing all elements of the program that can be implemented independently by the management, we are still looking forward to the City Council taking legislative action on new enforcement tools to help bring down more sheds quickly.”
Not all sheds are pointless, of course. New construction and imminent safety issues do their part. But the most prominent suspect is New York’s Area 11 Law, which requires buildings taller than six stories to be inspected every five years. Demolition is authorized when unsafe conditions are found, but the law effectively encourages landowners to keep sheds permanent because doing so is cheaper than making necessary repairs.
For its part, the City Council’s housing committee held a meeting in June on a package of bills aimed at addressing the problem, including a key proposal that would allow for stricter laws and fines. Testimony at trial came from a passionate group of diverse stakeholders—neighborhood community groups and homeowners, to name a few—with near agreement that something should be done.
At the same time, there was considerable disagreement about how the proposed law would actually work. (Some of the ideas focused not on removing the sheds but on beautifying them, including one that would allow artwork on the buildings.) While some who presented evidence applauded the package, others said the proposals would mandate unrealistic timelines for completing the work required to take down the sheds, especially given how difficult it is to comply with existing regulations. of security in the first place, they say.
“Leaving sheds longer than necessary hurts us on every level, and we don’t need legislation as an incentive to remove them as soon as possible safely and legally,” commented another group of condo and co-op owners. .
Where a shed is not just a shed
For some New Yorkers, the chronic fraud is not just an eyesore but a visible reminder of the bureaucracy, inefficiency, and gridlock that often impedes the city’s progress. How is America’s biggest city supposed to solve its most pressing problems when it can’t even govern not set up a sea of buildings that everyone seems to hate?
According to the city’s spreadsheet as of Wednesday, about 41% of active shed permits are the result of Local Rule 11. (The remaining permits are identified as “construction or maintenance.”) That percentage appears to be relatively unchanged from the beginning of last year. I The Wall Street Journal it repeated the same percentage in February when it added to the growing pile of anti-repeal letters with a look at data that revealed the extent of the problem.
The good news is, the city commissioned a full review of Local Law 11 through Thornton Tomasetti, a communications firm. Fortunately, the company will discover what eight million New Yorkers already know: The system is deeply broken.
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