Numlock Sunday: Fola Akinnibi on what's beneath New York's facade

Photo by Madison Olling on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Fola Akinnibi over at Bloomberg who wrote New York, City of Scaffolding, Tries a Glow-up.Here is what I wrote about it:

Building owners, particularly in New York, install scaffolding and sidewalk sheds as safety measures when possible facade issues emerge. The problem is that the cost of keeping the sheds up is often less than the cost of actually fixing the issue, which leads to stretches of sidewalk essentially permanently sheltered under temporary structures. There are currently 7,500 such sheds in New York City, covering 330 miles of sidewalk, enough to circle Manhattan 10 times, with an average age of 550 days, and some even now decades old. The oldest, a stretch of scaffolding in the East Village, has been up for over 15 years. Some of this is on the city — hell, two of the three oldest sheds are on city-owned buildings — but lately, the push has been to roll out new desig…