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 designs that are less ad hoc and ugly for what may be long renovations.

Fola and I spoke about how these sidewalk sheds first started to darken our doorstep, why some of them last for decades, and how the city wants to change that.

Akinnibi can be found at Bloomberg, on Twitter @FolaAk and on BlueSky.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Fola, thank you so much for coming on again. You do such interesting stuff, particularly about big cities like New York, and it’s always good to have you back.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

You most recently wrote a story about sidewalk sheds. Do you want to talk a little bit about what sidewalk sheds are for folks who maybe don’t live in a city that requires them?

Yeah, so sidewalk scaffolding, or they’re formally known as, sidewalk sheds, are safety structures that in New York City are put on the sidewalks to protect people from falling debris from the facades of buildings while maintenance work is being done or construction is being done. So they’re just a pretty basic safety measure in the city.

Can you talk a little bit about facades? Because I think that a lot of times people will see the scaffolding in the street and assume that it means, “Oh, there’s construction going on,” or, “Oh, they’re building something.” That is actually rarely the case. It is usually far more related to the avoidance of construction?

Yeah to answer that question, I’ll wind back a little bit. In the 1970s, uptown, a Barnard student was taking a walk in the evening and a piece of a building facade fell off and struck her and killed her. In response to this incident, in response to the tragedy, the city created and implemented these rules around facade maintenance and upkeep. Essentially what those rules do is they require every, it’s like on the cycle every five years, an inspection.

If there are issues that are found with the facade of a building, then a shed is required to protect people from falling debris, and then the building owner is required to make repairs. Now, in New York City, if you fast forward, there have been multiple layers of rules and regulations added on top of that. I think it’s a 1980s law.

Now, in New York City, you see thousands of these structures. I think there’s like 7,500 across the city, on the city streets. And what we’re finding today is that instead of doing the repairs, which can be costly, building owners will just leave the shed up and just defer maintenance, defer repairs. In some cases, they just don’t have the money, right? They’re undercapitalized, so they’ll just defer maintenance until they do have the money or they’ll just defer maintenance indefinitely. Some of these sheds have been up for 10 years. The oldest one, I think, has been up for 15 years. And so they’re just languishing on the sidewalks, and they look gross.

Yeah, it seems like it’s an interesting situation where the cost of a one-time fix is just going to be far more expensive than just putting up plywood and steel.

In some cases, there is construction going on. These are required if you’re building a building. In some cases, they’re there for construction, which also takes a long time. A building is going to take, in some cases, years to put up. So you can understand why there would be a shed up for that period of time. But in other cases, the sheds are languishing because of deferred maintenance. I’ll also note that two of the oldest sheds in the city are on city-owned buildings. So even the city is guilty of this deferred maintenance issue.

There’s not a lot of ways around the fact that if you have a dangerous facade, you need to protect people from the dangerous facade. And the conclusions have not necessarily been engineering-related or even structural legislation-related. They’ve instead been aesthetic.

Right. To a certain extent, it’s maybe an acknowledgment that we’re going to have to live with some version of these. I think the idea was, “Well, let’s make them look a little better than they look.” There have been a few iterations of these beautification attempts, and this most recent one falls in part in that category, right? These sheds are this dark green color. That was implemented, I think, during the Bloomberg era to make them uniform. They thought, “Well, if these things look uniform, they’ll look better.” And it’s clearly not.

There was a design competition around that same time. The winner of that design competition, the Urban Umbrella, tried to eliminate some of the cross-bracing, which can trap people on the sidewalk, which people often use as a leaning post or a pull-up bar. It eliminates that cross-bracing, it has these white steel posts, and instead, the structure is supported by something like umbrella prongs at the top that hold up the shed. These, too, were an attempt to make them look better.

The problem is that the green sheds are cheap. And the materials are ubiquitous. And they’re faster to put up. People are used to putting them up, so the Urban Umbrella hasn’t caught on to the same extent as the green ones because it’s too expensive for a building owner, who in some cases is deferring maintenance because they can’t afford it, to buy a fancy shed. There’s only like 100 and something of these Urban Umbrellas up in the city, again, compared to 7,000+ of the green sheds around.

Now, again, the city is releasing these new designs. The difference between these and the Urban Umbrella is that they are city-owned designs, not owned by a private company.. People will be able to use them open source, and the city hopes that’ll push down the cost of using the designs.

There have been some other things that the city’s doing with rules when it comes to costs, right?

Yeah. The other aspect of this, and to answer the other part of the question, is that in order to reduce the number of sheds on the street and keep them from languishing, it’s not just a beautification issue. There’s also a rules issue here, and the city is trying to address that this time. In addition to the new designs, the city has taken steps to increase fines for sheds that are languishing. And reduce permit renewal periods; people with sheds up have to renew your permit more often, so you have to say, “Hey, this is what the shed is up for. This is what we’re doing to address the issue, et cetera.” ]

The city is also in the process of easing some of the inspection schedules. For facades that use newer materials or a glass building that they just built, does it really need to be inspected every five years? You’re not at the same risk as a 100-year-old building that has a masonry facade that is crumbling, right? Increasing that schedule and allowing for different types of inspections, the city hopes, will create a situation where there are fewer sheds necessary and the sheds that are up are up for less time. It’s like a two-pronged attempt, to reduce the number of sheds and reduce the time that the sheds that are already up are up.

It seems like they’re ubiquitous in New York in no small part because we seem to take things more seriously than other cities do. Obviously, we have a lot more buildings, but it seems like Boston and Chicago have an inspection schedule that is a little less aggressive.

Yeah. And again, they have that leeway that allows for different schedules for different materials because, again, not all facades are created equally here.

I want to talk about another article of yours, and you can take some time to pull it up if you want. You had an article a little bit before this called, “Will Transit Be Any Better After the World Cup?” And I have been wondering this a lot, and so I guess I will just ask you the question in the headline of your article. Will transit be any better now that we’re after the World Cup?

I think for a lot of the World Cup cities in the U.S., the World Cup was an opportunity to think about how people move around those cities, right? They’re having a huge influx of guests and travelers and fans that are looking to get to games or to get to a fanfest and to move around their city. So a lot of these cities that don’t have robust public transit systems rolled out bus services, extended bus services, extended train services and the like. Some of those lines are temporary, or they’re temporary routes. They can just go straight to a stadium, shuttle bus service that goes to a stadium or to a fan zone. Many of those were just for the World Cup.

You also have cities like L.A. and Seattle that were already doing upgrades — L.A. for the Olympics in 2018 and Seattle just doing transit improvements that happened to coincide – that had pieces that coincided with the World Cup. Those, obviously, are just infrastructure improvements that will remain, and those will be used in those cities going forward.

What remains to be seen is if these cities see any of those improvements and say, “Hey, this worked really well for the World Cup, and this will also work really well for our city.” It’s hard to say right now. In Seattle, for example, they’re considering making an open street permanent. That’s not transit improvement, it’s just city improvement and they’re like, “Oh, this is nice, we might keep this.” New York — obviously, Mayor Mamdani is rolling out new bus lanes, it seems like, on a weekly or biweekly basis now. And there were bus routes that were implemented during the World Cup. It’s not clear if those will be used as a test run for a new bus route or bus lane or priority bus zone. Again, this is just all a long way of saying it remains to be seen. I don’t think anyone has come out and said, “This worked so great during the World Cup, we’re keeping it.”

Well, Fola, where can folks find you and where can they find your work?

Yeah, I’m a writer for CityLab, so you can find me at citylab.com. I’m on Twitter, @FolaAk. I’m on BlueSky and Bloomberg.com.