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In New York City it is impossible for anyone to miss the epidemic that sidewalk sheds are.
Everyone regardless of their income, race and gender have had to walk under these green plywood
and steel structures while navigating the city. On March 26, 2025, the New York City Council passed legislation,
initially proposed in 2023, that they say will strengthen the safety and efficiency of sidewalk shed management.
This includes bills shortening the maximum duration of sidewalk shed permits and bills that they claim will improve the designs of sidewalk sheds.
According to publicly available data as of May 15, 2025, there are 8,550 active scaffolds across New York City.
In New York City, Local Law 11 of 1998 also referred to as the Façade Inspection Safety Program or FISP, requires all buildings over six stories to have
their facades inspected every five years. On multiple occasions in New York City people have been killed by falling debris from building facades.
But according to government officials these sheds come with their own set of problems.
Originally intended to keep people safe, sidewalk sheds can reduce visibility and create shadowy spaces — sparking concerns about their connection to crime. To determine how impactful sidewalk sheds are on crime rates I looked at community district 108 which had the highest total active shed permits in Manhattan in 2025. Using the geographic data associated with each shed permit I mapped them along side the geographic coordinates of complaints called into the NYPD in district 108.
Each blue dot represents the approximate location of a crime.
Each red dot represents an active sidewalk shed's permitted address.
The city's publically available data on sidewalk sheds treats each shed as point rather than a range reflecting the footprint of the shed. In an effort to filter out crimes clearly unrelated to the existence of a sidewalk shed I expanded the radius of each crime data point to 200 feet. If a point denoting a sidewalk shed permit overlapped within that radius it remained on my map and was labeled a "Scaffolding Associated Crime."
Each blue circle represents a crime within 200 feet of an active sidewalk shed.
Each red dot represents an active sidewalk shed's permitted address.
When adjusting for "Scaffolding Associated Crime" the year-to-date crimes reduced from 1822 to 1161. Indicating that crimes associated with
scaffolding make up a larger portion of the total crimes than those that are unrelated. This however is not conclusive as 2025 has not yet over.
Additionally the city publishes active shed data daily, overwritting historic data and does not make that data available to the public.
In order to remedy this I used Chat GPT to assist me in writing python code that tells my computer to automatically download the new active shed data, every day at 8 am.
I also asked Chat GPT to export the instructions for how to do this linked here.