Will Shed Dread Be Dead? Boro Pres Pushes New Regs to Speed Dismantling of Scaffolding

What’s 280 miles long and covers 4,000 Manhattan buildings? If you guessed scaffolding, you are correct. The linear distance would cover a straight-line stroll from Times Square to the eastern Buffalo suburbs.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, with backing from City Council majority leader Keith Powers, is proposing new laws and overhauling regulations to make sure that the unsightly building scaffolds are taken down as quickly as possible.

He said 230 construction sheds in the city have been up for five years or more and one in Washington Heights has been standing since 2006.

“New York is a beautiful city,” Levine said, “but it’s hard to fully appreciate that beauty when you’re standing under one of the thousands of buildings in the city covered in scaffolding.”

Levine in a report released March 6 entitled “Shed the Shed,” said the new laws are a “mix of carrots and sticks” to offer incentives to help building owners cut red tape as well as increasing penalties for laggards. He cited building owners who are happy to pay the current $5,000 fine year after year rather than pony up the millions of dollars that it could take for remediation of their buildings, especially non-brick terra cotta. He also calls for a law that would allow direct involvement by the city if an owner or builder fails to take action in a timely fashion–and then bill the building owner for the completed work.

The average Manhattan building scaffolding stays up for 490 days. As many New Yorkers know, some buildings stay up for years. Crain’s New York Business reported that one shed at West 96th St. and Central Park West has stood for nearly 15 years and reported the oldest shed in the city has been up since 2006 on Edgecombe Ave in Washington Heights. Levine noted that even a shed at the Department of Buildings in downtown Manhattan had stood for 11 years before it was finally taken down in 2019.

He also proposed allowing drone inspections to cut the time contractors spend awaiting inspectors after builders and owners make repairs.

Levine mentioned making low-interest loans available for building owners to expedite the funding of reconstruction and repairs. Currently, for most owners that is an expensive and time-consuming process. Conversely, penalties for not completing the work on schedule would be increased. There are other parts to this program, involving more flexibility in design criteria to allow use of different designs and scaffolding types, better passageways, with more light and brighter colors, and extending the time between inspections by two years–up to seven years instead of five–for both new buildings with lower risk materials and buildings that have completed major facade work.

For landmarked buildings, which face particularly onerous restrictions, Levine proposes a new façade permitting process at the Landmark Preservation Commission that would entail expanding the staff available and dedicating a unit specifically to follow Local Law 11 compliance for these repairs.

Also at the kickoff was Manhattan City Councilman Erik Bottcher who warned about the general dislike for scaffolds by Manhattanites. “Listen to what people are saying,” he said.

Whenever you travel to any large city around the world, one will never see the proliferation of sidewalk sheds that you do in New York City, Bottcher said.

Mayor Adams is also on board and even the Building Department said they welcome the input as well. Adams said in his 2023 State of the City address that his administration is “laser-focused” on reclaiming valuable public space for New Yorkers, strengthening oversight of longstanding sidewalk sheds, and improving shed design requirements to keep the city’s streetscapes “vibrant.”

Manhattan, with 4,000 sheds has the greatest concentration of scaffolding in the city. Across the other four boroughs, there are only an additional 5,000 sheds, putting the citywide number at 9,000. The Buildings Department told Crain’s NYB that there are actually 20 percent fewer sheds today than the 11,000 present in 2020.

“We all know scaffolding on Manhattan’s streets is a vexing challenge, but it is fixable,” Levine said. “Let’s put these smart policies in place now to make every block in our borough safer and more beautiful.”