Where the sidewalk shed ends: NYC to pass ‘major’ scaffolding reforms

Could there be light at the end of the sidewalk shed?

The New York City Council is set to pass a package of measures Wednesday to speed up the removal of the dreary, green, wooden structures that encase apartment buildings citywide — sometimes for years at a time.

The sheds, colloquially known as “scaffolding,” protect people on the street level and support construction work, but many residents see them as eyesores. Research has also shown they can lead to reduced earnings for businesses in their shadows.

Scaffolding now shrouds about 400 miles of sidewalk throughout the five boroughs, according to city data. That’s nearly enough steel and plywood to stretch from Grover Cleveland High School in Queens to Cleveland, Ohio.

The sheds’ ubiquity is part of the reason people tend to hate them, said City Councilmember Keith Powers, who sponsored three of the bills heading to a vote Wednesday.

“New Yorkers walk around the streets and they see their small businesses buried underneath scaffolding, no longer visible to the public,” said Powers, a Manhattan lawmaker and candidate for borough president. “They create these dark alleyways and they are a really costly part of our street life.”

He said his proposals, as well as two others sponsored by Councilmember Erik Bottcher of Manhattan, will help change that. The bills have broad support within the Council and are backed by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, though some building industry professionals say they could result in overenforcement.

Two of the bills would require property owners to apply for sidewalk shed permits every 90 days instead of every year and penalize landlords who fail to show proof they are promptly completing the work necessitating scaffolding, such as construction and demolition.

Another would enable the city Department of Buildings to lengthen the amount of time between facade inspections, which require owners to erect sidewalk sheds, to up to 12 years. Current rules force owners of buildings taller than six stories to hire an engineer for an inspection every five years, even if the building is brand new. The bill’s supporters say the change would reduce the overall amount of scaffolding in the city.

A fourth measure would increase the level of lighting required inside the sheds, brightening city sidewalks. The fifth would allow the buildings department to unveil new designs and colors for sidewalk sheds, beyond the familiar hunter green now mandated by law, and could make scaffolding more aesthetically pleasing.

The measures coincide with an initiative Adams and other top city officials launched in 2023 to “get sheds down.” Since then, the administration has targeted a 15-year-old shed outside the city chief medical examiner’s office, 14-year-old scaffolding outside Queens Supreme Court and a 5-year-old structure sheathing a Brooklyn high school. A city tracking tool shows thousands of sheds dotting the boroughs like a case of chickenpox.

Buildings Commissioner Jimmy Oddo said the bills will give the city “the updated regulations we need to push owners into repairing their buildings, and we can start to make serious progress on getting more sheds down faster.”

A tragedy spawned the strict regulations in place today. City lawmakers enacted measures to expand inspection requirements for sidewalk sheds after a Barnard College student was struck and killed by a falling chunk of facade in Morningside Heights in 1979.

Still, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, a vocal proponent of updating the city’s scaffolding rules, said the current regulations already surpass similar safety laws in every other city in the country.

“This is a set of policy changes that people will notice,” said Levine, who is running for city comptroller. “This will be a major change to the physical landscape of the city.”

The existing laws have fueled a lucrative scaffolding industry where companies charge building owners thousands of dollars to erect the structures and thousands more each month to keep them up. In many cases, advocates for reform say, those expenses may be cheaper than doing the underlying building work, so some owners opt to keep the sheds in place — sometimes for decades.

Eric Dillenberger, a Manhattan building owner who has worked in the construction industry, called the sidewalk sheds a “necessary evil that protect the public and facilitate construction.”

He said he supports efforts to remove sidewalk sheds faster, but worries the new rules under consideration could be used to punish owners who cannot complete facade work quickly due to financial or logistical issues.

“There’s the positive side in that it could move things along, but the negative side is if it becomes punitive and they start nickel-and-diming owners,” Dillenberger said.