A Live Accountability Tracker for NYC Sidewalk Sheds
What this is
Sheds pulls from NYC Open Data daily and surfaces every active sidewalk shed permit: who owns it, how long it has been up, and whether the permit has been renewed within the 90-day term required by Local Law 48 of 2025. The data updates automatically and is free to use.
Local Law 48 of 2025
Effective January 12, 2026, Local Law 48 of 2025 shortens sidewalk shed permits to 90 days (down from one year). Permits must be manually renewed and cannot be renewed until DOB penalties for sheds in the public right-of-way are paid. Beginning with the second renewal, owners must submit a registered design professional’s report documenting work performed since the last renewal, work in progress, and the time still needed.
Penalties scale by linear foot of shed per month of inactivity: $10/lf under 3 years, $100/lf at 3 to 4 years, and $200/lf past 4 years (capped at $6,000 per month). One- and two-family homes and sheds for demolition, new construction, or enlargement are exempt.
Sheds marked “Overdue” on this site have not had a status update in DOB NOW in over 90 days, which strongly suggests the permit was not renewed within its issued term. Status is an estimate. DOB does not publish penalty payment status or LL48 renewal-report submissions to Open Data, so we cannot show every dimension of compliance directly. See also Local Law 47 (capping new shed extensions at 40 feet from the building, effective August 2026), the Get a Lid on It! reform initiative, and the DOB’s sidewalk sheds page.
How we classify sheds
DOB NOW publishes a current_status_date field on each sidewalk shed permit, which updates whenever DOB processes a renewal, owner change, or status reclassification. We use the days since that date as a proxy for permit-renewal activity:
- Compliant — status updated within the last 90 days (within the LL48 permit term).
- Active repair — updated within the last 30 days.
- Overdue — no status update in 90 to 180 days. The 90-day permit term has elapsed without a recorded renewal.
- Expired — no status update in 180+ days. Two missed renewal cycles.
What we cannot see: DOB does not publish penalty payment status or the design-professional renewal reports required by LL48 to Open Data. So a shed with a recent current_status_date probably reflects a renewal, but we cannot prove it. Status is an estimate.
Why we don’t show fine estimates
LL48/2025 sets penalties per linear foot of shed per month, scaling by shed age: $10/lf/month under 3 years, $100/lf/month at 3 to 4 years, and $200/lf/month past 4 years (capped at $6,000/month per shed).
Because every penalty in the law scales by linear footage, an honest dollar estimate requires knowing each shed’s length. The DOB NOW dataset does not publish that field. We could fill it in with an assumed average and add a footnote, but that produces numbers that look authoritative without being so. Until DOB publishes shed dimensions we’re leaving the dollar figure off entirely.
Data
All shed data comes from the DOB NOW Build filings dataset on NYC Open Data, filtered to active sidewalk shed permits. The cron runs daily at 4am ET. Downloads are available below.
Built by
Built with love by Leo Xia. Not affiliated with NYC DOB or the Mayor’s Office. Source on GitHub.