By Kathryn Farrell for HABITAT
In the spring of 1979, a Barnard College freshman named Grace Gold died when she was struck by a chunk of terra cotta that fell from a building facade at the corner of 115th Street and Broadway. The city promptly passed Local Law 10, which required owners of buildings over six stories tall, including co-op and condo boards, to inspect and repair their facades every five years.
The law was later modified as Local Law 11 and is now known as the Facade Inspection and Safety Program (FISP). Has it made buildings safer? The answer turns out to be complicated.
A recent analysis of facade-compliance filings from the NYC Open Data project reveals an ever-growing number of “unsafe” buildings and delayed repairs. In the latest FISP cycle, 13.3% of inspection filings were classified as unsafe — up sharply from less than 1% two decades ago.
Does this mean that buildings are getting less safe? No, say engineers, who note that the striking statistics reflect something more complicated: the facade-inspection system has become far more aggressive and less forgiving over the past two decades. In fact, some engineers say, the city’s building stock is in far better shape today than it was twenty years ago, despite the statistics.
?”The way the law used to be is unrecognizable from what it is now,” says Stephen Varone, president of RAND Engineering & Architecture. “If you go back far enough, you literally had what were called drive-by inspections, because the whole thing was visual. You just do it from the street and whatever you sent in (to the Department of Buildings, DOB) was accepted. You almost didn’t even know what a rejected report was.”
That has changed — dramatically.
?”Since the sixth cycle (2005-2009), the DOB has been much more proactive in reviewing, policing, and doing forensics on reports,” says Gene Ferrara, president of JMA Consultants. “In the review of their reports, if they see photographs of conditions that are not safe, or not really SWARMP (Safe With a Repair and Maintenance Program) for more than 12 months, they ask the professional to reclassify and to file as unsafe.”
That increased scrutiny has changed the work of engineers and architects who prepare FISP reports. Eric Cowley, an engineer and president of Cowley Engineering, says it has become increasingly difficult to get DOB approval on reports, forcing professionals to revise and resubmit them multiple times during an inspection cycle. “Every forty-five days I’m rewriting reports and submitting them and getting them rejected,” Cowley says. “And so it ends up, okay, it’s unsafe, put a sidewalk shed up.”
Which puts co-op and condo boards on a collision course with the city’s campaign to remove sheds as quidkly as possible. When the city launched its Get Sheds Down initiative in 2023, officials reported approximately 9,000 active sidewalk sheds citywide. More recent estimates place the number closer to 8,000, and sheds remain in place for an average of 498 days.
“At the same time that the city is pushing to get the sheds down,” says Varone, “the hardest thing to get accepted is an amended report, where you’re in an unsafe status, you do a repair program, and you’re trying to get it signed off. It can take months and months, and the shed is sitting there.”
And the meter never stops running.
“You have to renew your shed permits every three months,” Varone says. If a building does not show significant progress on repairs at renewal, the DOB can deny the extension, exposing the building to fines of up to $6,000 per month.
Some boards are tempted to delay repairs since a sidewalk shed may cost less than a major facade project, and the board may need time to raise money. But delay has its limits. “It is cheaper to put up a shed than to do repairs, but you eventually have to do the fix, and it’s not going to get any better,” Cowley says. “It just gets more expensive. So the rationale to put up a shed to delay doing something makes sense if you needed to wait a year to raise the money. But beyond that, you have to do the work.”