Will New City Rules Finally Bring More Sidewalk Sheds Down?

“We want sheds down, but more importantly, we’re happy to see that work is getting done,” Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani told City Limits in a recent interview. “We’re balancing better protection with creating a built environment where mobility and access and enjoyment of that space doesn’t have to be so much impaired.”

On Friday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released one of his trademark social media videos, detailing how his administration plans to tackle an issue high on many New Yorkers’ list of complaints about life in the city: the proliferation of construction scaffolding, or sidewalk sheds, around so many of its buildings.

Local laws mandate property owners erect the sheds when building or demolishing projects over a certain height, or when conditions are deemed unsafe—a determination made during costly, hands-on facade inspections the city requires every five years. The rules are intended to protect pedestrians below from falling debris, like that which killed Grace Gold, a Barnard College student whose 1979 death spurred some of the city’s existing safety rules.

But in some cases, landlords opt to leave the sheds in place until their next inspection or to delay making expensive repairs, meaning the same scaffolding stays up for months, or even years. As of Monday, more than 7,800 sheds dotted the five boroughs—totaling more than 1.8 million linear feet—and the average one has been up for more than 500 days, city data shows.

“What scaffolds do is they really detract from public life. They make you feel as if there are parts of our city where your point is just to get through them,” Mamdani said in Friday’s video, which included a cameo from documentarian filmmaker John Wilson, who devoted a 2020 episode of his quirky, namesake HBO series to the city’s scaffolding rules.

“I think there are a lot of parts of life in our city that we have just come to accept, as if it’s the cost of being a New Yorker or living in New York City,” the mayor continued. “When in fact, these are political decisions.”

But Mamdani isn’t the first mayor who’s made scaffolding promises: Mike Bloomberg held an international design competition to imagine better-looking scaffolding, and later required sheds be painted the same shade of hunter green. Bill de Blasio focused on taking them down at city-owned sites, allocating millions of dollars to repair facades at NYCHA to do so. And Eric Adams launched what he called the “Get Sheds Down” initiative, which also included the unveiling of new, chicer designs for the structures and commissioning an 18-month study on best scaffolding practices.

Mamdani’s plan builds on those earlier efforts, as well changes the City Council passed last year, according to Department of Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani.

“We’re taking ideas, and we’re moving as quickly as we can to turn ideas into action,” he told City Limits in a recent interview.

Those ideas include changes to the city’s inspection cycle: building owners will be required to conduct the more extensive (and expensive) hand-on facade inspections every six years instead of five, while newer buildings that pose fewer risks can apply for an initiative that requires those inspections just every 12 years. Owners will be required to do shorter visual inspections in between, which Tigani says has been facilitated by technological advancements that made it easier to gauge a building’s condition using cameras and other tools.

“The tech we have now to do visual inspections is leagues beyond what we had even a couple of years ago,” he said. The new timeline was shaped by that 18-month study commissioned under former Mayor Adams, in coordination with engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, which looked at tens of thousands of inspection reports and “compared notes” with cities around the world to see how they handle facade safety, Tigani said.

DOB is also ramping up enforcement with a new rule that will penalize building owners who keep sidewalk sheds up for more than 180 days, and they’ll also be required to update the department on the progress of repairs every 90 days.

“We want sheds down, but more importantly, we’re happy to see that work is getting done,” Tigani said. “That’s really the key here—that buildings are getting repaired, that facades are being made more safe, and people can walk under these buildings and feel more comfortable.”

To that last point, stemming from a bill passed by the City Council last year, DOB is also changing a rule that requires sheds cover a certain amount of space—spanning up to half of the height of the building in question, in some cases—that the agency deemed unnecessary.

Sheds can now extend no more than 40 feet away from buildings, what officials say will address some of the quality of life complaints about scaffolding that New Yorkers know so well: that the structures take up precious space, block out light and obscure storefronts.

That change will be especially impactful on campuses like NYCHA, where aging buildings and billions of dollars in repair needs have led to a proliferation of scaffolding, interrupting the developments’ intentionally planned open spaces.

“Any campus environment—Mitchell-Lamas, NYCHA—those buildings were laid out so that people can walk through and enjoy a passive recreational activity,” Tigani said. “And now we are able to create that safety during these construction periods without ruining the ground level experience as much, and that will make a real difference.”

The rule changes, to take effect this summer, come as NYCHA continues repair work aimed at getting more sheds down: Since 2022, the agency has allocated more than $650 million in state and federal funds in facade restoration at 40 developments, prioritizing those with sheds that have been up for five years or more. The agency has taken down over 100,000 linear feet of scaffolding at some 200 NYCHA buildings so far, officials said.

Things are already trending in the right direction: beyond public housing, there are approximately 1221 actively-permitted sidewalk sheds at city-owned properties, down more than 3 percent compared to summer 2023, a DOB spokesperson said.

The total number of sidewalk sheds citywide, at both public and privately-owned properties, has also declined by about 15 percent over the last three years, officials said.

“What we are interested in is compliance. This isn’t about being punitive,” Tigani said. “We’re balancing better protection with creating a built environment where mobility and access and enjoyment of that space doesn’t have to be so much impaired.”

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