City Comptroller Scott Stringer has a point — barely. Many landlords install “public spaces” in residential complexes as part of deals with the city to allow them to put up larger buildings — and then lock the public out of those spaces. In an audit last week, Stringer called them out for doing so, and pointed a finger at the Department of Buildings for its lack of enforcement.
But laying the blame for non-enforcement mostly on the Department of Buildings is ridiculous. The historically underfunded, understaffed DOB has weightier problems on its plate — including safety inspections and vetting applications for new projects in the midst of an unprecedented construction boom.
Stringer himself lambasted the DOB last year over failing to adequately monitor cranes after four recent major collapses. “Crane safety is a crisis, but the city has not treated it like one,” Stringer fumed.
The key word is “crisis.” Building tragedies and near-tragedies — such as the collapse of a concrete pillar last fall in the DOB’s own headquarters building at 280 Broadway, as reported in The Post — are a crisis.
Failure to comply with rules for public spaces, including at Trump Tower, is objectionable and deserving of rebuke. But it falls well short of constituting a genuine crisis, and thus requiring a crisis response from the Department of Buildings, which lacks the resources even for its core missions.
Occasional past department scandals involving bribery of inspectors are neither a reaction to, nor an argument against, addressing DOB’s main problem — that the vital agency has been historically treated as an afterthought by City Hall, possibly dating back to Dutch times.
The DOB’s budget for fiscal 2017 is about $170 million, virtually all of it paid for by the city, according to the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.
The city’s contribution to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, by comparison, is a whopping $665 million. (The DOH’s budget totals $1.6 billion, but most of it is paid for by the feds.) Some of that is for inspectors who hunt for “evidence of mouse droppings” in restaurants and hand-wash signs too far from sinks.
DOB is even underfunded compared to the Department of Cultural Affairs, which the city funds to the tune of $181 million.
Did you know that the DOH has 19 times more inspectors proportionately for restaurants than DOB does for buildings? Specifically, DOH has one inspector for roughly every 160 eateries, compared with one DOB inspector for every 3,075 buildings.
I base those estimates on data provided by the agencies — 150 DOH inspectors for the city’s 24,000 restaurants, and 317 DOB inspectors to monitor 975,000 “buildings and properties.” The figures have barely moved since they were given to me three years ago.
Incredibly, DOB’s staff was actually cut from 1,200 to 1,000 between 2008 and 2012. It has since had a hiring uptick. But even the 31 percent more new positions cited last fall by the DOB since 2012 is woefully insufficient for a city awash in new development. Real estate dealmakers fume over delays and red tape on a scale never before seen — slowing projects that can cost millions of dollars more for every week they’re stalled by DOB inefficiency.
Just as incredibly, DOB didn’t introduce a computerized system until last summer to replace paper-based filing for applications. The $29.7 million system won’t even be fully operational until next year.
Building accidents and construction worker deaths can always occur. But they’d happen less frequently if City Hall and the public woke up to the need to give the DOB the muscle and manpower it needs — a cause that won’t be helped by hysteria over locked gardens and plazas.