New York City scaffolding targeted by new Mayor Eric Adams initiative

New York City will target nearly 400 miles of "unsightly" scaffolding clogging public sidewalks, often for years and without any actual repair work underway, Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday.

The “Get Sheds Down" initiative focuses on one of the worst "eyesores" of city life — the massive steel poles and wooden green sheds that darken sidewalks, discourage pedestrian traffic and encourage illegal activity, officials said.

The plan increases fines on property owners that keep the scaffolding, also known as sidewalk sheds, up unattended. It also redesigns those scaffolds that are needed, including replacing them with less intrusive safety netting. It begins by targeting one business district in each of four boroughs: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

"We have normalized the sheds all over our city and that is unacceptable," Adams said during a Manhattan news conference. "And all too often they stay up but no repairs are happening. They use the sheds as a form of pushing the repairs off year after year after year. And property owners are not required to pay a penny in fines."

The majority of city scaffolding was erected due to a Department of Buildings requirement that properties higher than six stories have their exterior walls inspected every five years, officials said. The owner of any building with a defect that threatens public safety or is designated unsafe is required to install some form of pedestrian protection, such as a sidewalk shed.

But very often, officials said, property owners fail to make the repairs and sheds remain up indefinitely.

There are 9,000 active permitted scaffolds in the city — occupying 3% of the city's total sidewalk space — that are up for an average of nearly 500 days, almost always without any financial penalty, Adams said. More than 1,000 sheds have been up for more than three years; roughly 500 have been in place for at least five years, while 200 have been up for a decade, said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine.

"If it only takes a few days or weeks to do the work, why are the sheds up?," Levine said. "Sometimes it's because you've got building owners who have done the math and they've realized that they can spend a little bit of money to rent the shed or pay a million dollars or more for the repairs, and they're just opting to take the cheap way out."

The mayor plans to ask the City Council to pass legislation imposing up to $6,000 in monthly penalties on property owners that refuse to remove sheds or to complete needed repairs, and up to $10,000 in fines in central business districts. Single-family homes employing safety netting instead of traditional sheds would be exempt from the fines.

In the coming weeks, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services will pilot the use of safety netting for the ongoing façade work in front of Queens County Supreme Court in Jamaica, where scaffolding has been in place since April 2017.

By the end of the summer, the city's Department of Buildings will issue a request for proposals soliciting new design ideas from architecture and engineering experts for a more aesthetically pleasing scaffolding design. That could be in place by the end of next year.

In the interim, officials will require increased lighting under existing sheds, while allowing art to be installed on scaffolding currently in place. Shed permits would also need to be renewed every 90 days, as opposed to the current annual duration, while the Department of Buildings would no longer grant penalty waivers for expired shed permit violations, officials said.

By Robert Brodsky

robert.brodsky@newsday.com@BrodskyRobert

Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.