New York City shouldn't be covered in sidewalk sheds

New York City shouldn't be covered in sidewalk sheds

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 10 minutes

New York City shouldn't be covered in sidewalk sheds

My hometown needs less solipsism

New episode of Bad Takes on both-sidesism and its enemies is out today.

Walking around New York City, it’s hard not to be struck by the incredible quantity of sidewalk sheds — that’s what you’re supposed to call them, though growing up in the city, our vernacular was “scaffolding.” These sheds aren’t unique to New York — you see at least some broadly similar infrastructure in any urban environment with tall buildings and sidewalks.

But in NYC, they are quasi-ubiquitous in a way that’s unlike any other place I’ve been. And in interacting with New Yorkers over the years, I’ve noticed something interesting — when I notice something weird about the city, my default assumption is that some bad policy in place in NYC is driving the problem. Many New Yorkers, though, have the opposite instinct — if they see some apparently inexplicable New York phenomenon, they’ll assume there’s a good reason for it. And I do kind of get where those divergent intuitions come from.

New York really is an outlier among American cities, both dramatically larger and dramatically denser than any other city in the U.S.

And there truly are aspects of its reality that can only be explained with reference to that outlier status. We know, for example, that places with high population density tend to be more left-wing politically than low-density places. But Staten Island is a moderately Republican area despite being denser than Detroit, Denver, Las Vegas, Columbus, or Portland. In the context of a super-large and super-dense city, Staten Island plays the sociological role of a white-flight suburb, even though in a literal sense it has the population geography typical of a mid-sized American central city.

But for many issues, “this is bad policy” is a very underrated explanation for NYC weirdness, which in turn is a result of NYC’s outlier status. New York is such an extremely unusual global center of commerce and culture that a significant minority of people are willing to pay a huge premium in order to live and do business there. That manifests most obviously in the high price of New York rent. But for all the same reasons that it’s possible for landlords to extract high literal rent, NYC offers a unique bonanza of metaphorical rent-seeking behavior. Tolerating this has historically been bad for residents of the city, which is a non-trivial problem for the national economy because it’s so large — 2.5 percent of the national population lives in the city proper and 7 percent in the metro area. But what makes it especially problematic today is that remote work has delivered a structural shock to the economies of all central cities, meaning that putting up with malgovernment is less survivable than it was before.

The origins of ubiquitous sidewalk sheds

When I tweeted about the sidewalk sheds, a lot of people recommended (along with various pseudo-explanations) this video from Half as Interesting, which I think highlights the problems with NYC solipsism precisely because it’s a good video that also fails to ask some pretty obvious comparative questions.

The basic story is this:

After a tragic accident in which a young woman was killed by a piece of a falling facade, New York City adopted a local law (later strengthened by a subsequent law) requiring frequent facade inspections.

If a facade is found defective, owners must install a sidewalk shed pending repair.

Owners are then supposed to repair the facade, but there is no specific timeline mandated for doing the repair.

In many cases, building owners find it more economical to leave the sheds up for very long periods of time rather than do mandatory repairs.

The video does mention at the end that lobbying by the sidewalk shed industry plays a role, but the fundamental focus remains on building owners who rely on sheds because they’ve cheaped out on repairs.

Nothing about this account is wrong, exactly, but if you’ve lived in other cities, you might be inspired to ask some basic questions.

The law only applies to buildings that are over six stories tall, which are obviously more common in New York than in other cities, so in a kind of aggregate sense, there are more sidewalk sheds in New York than in other cities because there are more tall buildings. That said, it’s not just that sidewalk sheds are more common in New York than they are in Chicago or Philadelphia or Boston — the downtowns of these cities full of tall buildings still don’t have nearly the volume of sheds that you see in New York.

What you’re really seeing here is the intersection of three separate regulatory issues.

First, and most boring, is the fact that New York rules require sheds as a safety measure while many other jurisdictions around the world allow the use of nets, which are cheaper and have less visual impact.

Second, as Connor Harris wrote in January, NYC’s facade rules are unusually strict:

Unlike many other cities’ façade-maintenance requirements, New York’s regulation makes no allowances for building age or materials—even though newer buildings have far lower risk of façade disintegration, and particular materials such as terra cotta pose a much worse danger than others. Chicago’s façade ordinance, for instance, divides buildings into four classes based on their materials: those in the safest class must be inspected only every twelve years. Building owners in Chicago who conduct briefer examinations every two years, which can be carried out at a distance, can also skip the more expensive up-close inspections. Some other cities also require façade inspections only for older buildings: for instance, Cincinnati mandates façade inspections only for buildings over 15 years old.

Finally, and somewhat confusingly, the sidewalk sheds (or scaffolding) stay up so long in part because facade repairs are unusually expensive in New York due to a state law known as the Scaffold Law, even though it’s mostly not about scaffolding. This is a broadly worded 1885 statute directing employers of construction workers to create safe working conditions that’s been construed by state courts over the past 100+ years as creating essentially unlimited liability for employers of construction workers, and thus very high insurance costs. A lot of broadly worded statutes were passed back in the late 19th century. But in the modern world, construction workers in 49 states plus all non-construction workers in New York are protected by OSHA regulations and the workers’ compensation system.

You could make the case that these rules are worth the benefits.

But I don’t think New Yorkers fear for their lives walking around downtown Chicago. Nor do they appear to believe that the workers in non-construction industries in their state are laboring under intolerably unsafe conditions. A report by two Cornell scholars from 2014 actually found that the decision to assign strict legal liability to employers has made New York construction sites less safe because it leads workers to be sloppier.

I’m not going to pretend that I really kicked the tires on that analysis — maybe they are wrong and the liability rules have safety benefits. But what I do want to insist on is that New Yorkers should acknowledge that they are outliers in terms of the regulatory framework, which makes them outliers in terms of construction costs, which — paired with a few other regulatory choices — makes them outliers in sidewalk sheds.

The benefit of cost-benefit analysis

Many (though by no means all) categories of federal regulation need to go through a formal process of cost-benefit analysis in which the rule-writing agency is expected to provide some quantification of why the proposed rule is a good idea.

This process is often controversial on the left, except when the left realizes that good CBA sometimes (as in the case of air pollution) argues for much stricter regulation. The critiques of CBA that I think have genuine philosophical bite are those like Lisa Heinzerling’s point that there’s something fantastical about the idea that we can assign a monetary value to averting the extinction of polar bears. But in terms of human health and safety, I think CBA is indispensable because there are a potentially endless number of costly ways governments could act to save lives. Reasonable people can disagree as to the point at which a rule costs too much relative to the lives saved. But you definitely want to do the cheap life-saving interventions before you do the expensive ones. To the extent that the “left” position is we should treat human life as very, very valuable, that’s still not a point against CBA. You want to try to measure the costs and benefits of potential rules and make sure you are adopting low-cost, high-efficacy interventions first.

And with these NYC rules, we see what happens when you start tossing rules around without any process of formal quantification.

Obviously, we do not want parts of building facades falling on people’s heads and killing them. But how widespread is this problem? With some kind of baseline, you could then get a sense of what’s being achieved by requiring frequent inspections regardless of building age or material type. You could assess the benefits of requiring sheds rather than nets. The entire system of inspections, repairs, and sheds has been created without any sense of the base rate. It’s possible that New York’s outlier rules save tons of lives, and other cities should copy NYC's practice. But other American cities don’t appear to be raining masonry down on the heads of unsuspecting residents.

In Baltimore, they don’t have any façade inspection rule. And while I’ve heard plenty of people worry about taking a wrong turn in Baltimore and ending up in a high-crime neighborhood, I’ve never heard anyone say they fear for their lives walking around downtown because bricks might fall on their heads.

The Scaffold Law treatment of construction labor safety, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to have any benefit in terms of preventing injury. My guess is that New York could inspect most buildings less frequently, address problems with nets, make repairs cheaper and faster, and end up with a city that is safer and more sightly with lower operating costs for buildings. The losses would accrue to some shed companies, unions, and other vendors, but the city would be stronger for it.

American cities need to get serious

I think America’s city lovers have been living in a kind of fantasyland in terms of the impact of Covid-19 and remote work on the communities we like.

It’s important to avoid negative polarization here. Most people don’t like living in cities and prefer life in the suburbs. If you live in the suburbs, then needing to commute into a city is annoying — it’s both time-consuming and also keeps you tied to the suburbs of one particular city. If remote work lets you sever your ties to the city, you will greet it as an exciting prospect. But if you’re someone who loves the city, you will find this excitement annoying and will want to poo-poo it and insist on the continued importance of cities. You can get a nice Twitter fight going this way and have lots of fun.

At the end of the day, though, “suburbanites churlishly need to commute here” is not what any city lover loves about city living. Their excitement about not having to do it isn’t the issue.

The issue is that there is a concrete economic value to cities that comes from all the downtown commercial real estate-generated tax revenue and retail sales, and to an extent, that revenue boosted the property values of conveniently-located residential properties. Central city residents often don’t perceive or think about this value, in large part because a huge share of it is sucked away by rent-seeking special interest groups. A suburban town that adopted lots of crazy outlier rules would bleed residents to nearby similar towns and the rents would vanish. But downtown office districts and their attendant agglomeration effects created a nice pool of rents that could be sustainably skimmed, and the Zoom Shock has cut into these rents.

I’m not worried about New York in the way that I’m worried about Chicago. Every time I come back home, I check to see if I could possibly afford to raise my family in the neighborhood where I grew up, and every time the answer is “lol no.” I’m not a poor person who deserves subsidized housing from the government. NYC is just an extremely expensive city, so even if it takes a huge hit to demand, it will re-stabilize. But it’s still the case that the available rents are declining here and in every other central city.

Whether that takes the form of economic losses to residents or to rent-seekers is entirely up to the cities’ politicians, civic leaders, and citizens.

If they choose to turn the crisis into an opportunity, it’s easy to imagine New York growing into a place that’s better than ever, where transportation infrastructure and land area can support a much larger population and an insanely deep market of consumption amenities. But New Yorkers need to take a good hard look at the weirder aspects of the city and ask whether they make any sense.

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