The city’s most important shared spaces need a new strategy.
All of us step on it every day, but few of us think about its crucial and delicate role in knitting the city together. I’m speaking of the humble sidewalk — a terribly underappreciated, hotly contested piece of public real estate that deserves another look, and a policy agenda to meet the times.
In cities like New York, sidewalks are everywhere we turn. They connect us to work, recreation and culture. They literally connect us to one another. In so doing, they dictate how mobile we can be and in what ways, how safe and accessible our communities are and who can take advantage of a city’s vast array of opportunities.
But that’s not all. Sidewalks are also sites of commerce, from dining to advertising to vending and more. They’re sites of speech, protest, picketing and art. They’re sites of policing and surveillance — indeed, they’re some of the most heavily policed and surveilled spaces in cities today, sometimes with deadly consequences. They’re where some people sleep or make a living. They’re where we put much of the infrastructure that keeps a city running. And they’re where many of the challenges of the future, from climate change to new technology, will play out.
We often talk about “the public square” — usually thought of as a public space in the center of town — but the concrete strip that lines every street has a much more powerful role in shaping who we are.
This is true in cities and towns across the country, but nowhere is it more true and more salient than in New York City — the titan of the American sidewalk, with more than 12,000 miles of it. We New Yorkers truly live huge swaths of our lives on the sidewalk. The policies that govern these spaces are, however, long overdue for a second look.
First is the question of governance. In New York City as in many other places, it’s not the government and the public at large, but rather individual owners of adjacent property, who shoulder the burden of clearing snow and ice from the sidewalk and even of repairing it when it cracks or becomes uneven. The City’s Department of Sanitation even has a website reminding people that “property owners are required by law to clean the sidewalks and 18 inches into the street outside their properties” and allowing them to report their neighbors as “Sidewalk Slobs.” Why this arrangement? It’s partly an artifact of history — this is just how it’s been done for centuries — and partly because governments simply find it easier to offload these responsibilities onto the nearest people. But it’s not because of property law. In fact, the private property line of that adjacent home or business often ends before the sidewalk even starts.
What this means is that New Yorkers are obligated by law to care for property they don’t even own. Moreover, when people are injured because those sidewalks have not been kept in safe condition, city law places the liability on those same property owners. The City, which does own the sidewalk land, is only liable under narrow circumstances. Again, no deep legal reason beyond the City’s convenience.
In addition to being fundamentally at odds with basic property law, this arrangement often just doesn’t work all that well. Private property owners don’t necessarily have the interests of the whole city at heart, and even if they do, they might not have the ability or the resources to do these jobs well. This means that the quality of a neighborhood’s sidewalks can rise and fall with its residents’ fortunes.
Some cities are reevaluating this approach. For example, the voters in Denver, Colorado, decided in 2022 to make sidewalk maintenance a city responsibility, funded by a regular assessment imposed on property owners. Some of our neighbors upstate have done the same.
New York City should explore something similar. It would guarantee more accountable centralized responsibility, improve accessibility and lift up poorer neighborhoods by using money from folks on the Upper East Side to repair sidewalks in the South Bronx.
Second, we need to rethink how we balance a seemingly endless range of sidewalk uses. The panoply of activities that take place on the sidewalk are part and parcel of what makes New York City vibrant and exciting. The famous urbanist (and West Village resident) Jane Jacobs found great beauty and harmony in what she called the sidewalk “ballet.” But it’s zero-sum: Each sidewalk activity competes for limited space, and the space that each one uses leaves less for the others.
Sidewalk dining, for instance, is great for business and for customers, but it intrudes on the pedestrian thoroughfare, particularly for people with mobility limitations. DoorDash delivery drivers on e-bikes sometimes zoom on and off the sidewalk, and that’s likewise perhaps useful for restaurants and customers, but it risks endangering everyone else. Scaffolding and trash — whether containerized or not — both occupy space and make the environment less appealing for business or recreation. The national homelessness crisis represents another demand for scarce sidewalk space.
A protest can intrude on socializing, business, residents and more. Indeed, when it comes to protest, sometimes the intrusion is precisely the point.
New York City wants to build thousands upon thousands of new housing units. Growth will make the city’s narrow sidewalks more and more crowded. And armed with new technology, entrepreneurs across the country are putting sidewalk space to more and more private commercial use, from dockless scooter rentals to electric vehicle charging ports, delivery robots and even autonomous roving vending machines.
Because none of these uses is necessarily “better” than the others, it is essential to focus on harmonizing them with an eye towards expanding community opportunity rather than shrinking it. Otherwise, sidewalks are poised to become the modern tragedy of the commons, where too much uncoordinated pursuit of good or justifiable things risks depleting the resource for everyone. Perhaps they already are.
We’re quite unprepared to do this well right now. Regulatory responsibility for managing this mess is scattered across an array of city agencies that don’t always harmonize very well. Departments of Transportation, Parks, Sanitation, Buildings, Consumer Affairs, Homeless Services, Health, Fire, Police, Media and Entertainment and more all overlap. But none of them is well-equipped to see the whole picture. This means that gaps get left and unintended conflicts get created.
Consolidating and coordinating these functions into a Department of Sidewalks would be a huge step in the right direction. Such an agency would be charged with developing a wide-angle lens — with stepping back and seeing how the space works, what demands are being placed on it now and in the near future and how they interact with one another. It would then engage in more coherent regulation, with an eye toward ensuring that they lift one another up rather than tear one another apart. It would offer businesses and residents one-stop-shop permitting, more efficient and accountable maintenance and more equitable responsibility.
Even without a Department of Sidewalks, there’s so much the City can do better right now. We need to widen sidewalks in our most congested neighborhoods, like Fifth Avenue and the Theater District, where clogged sidewalks are dangerous, inaccessible and just plain frustrating for everyone trying to use them. We need to think proactively about new technology: if we want to see it deployed, our leaders need to build both the space and the regulatory architecture for it now. We need to more thoughtfully regulate deliveristas and businesses that use the sidewalks to ensure that these critical spaces are not only lucrative, but safe and inviting for everyone. We need to keep paring back and improving the omnipresent scaffolds that throw our sidewalks into darkness, threatening commerce, recreation and pedestrians alike. And we need to keep advancing more humane approaches that get people experiencing homelessness off the sidewalks and onto their own two feet in stable and secure housing.
Our sidewalks are a big part of what makes New York City the greatest city in the world, but they are also its Achilles’ heel. Without careful planning, they can easily descend into chaos as the range of uses grows and grows. In short, that “sidewalk ballet” that Jane Jacobs described over 60 years ago could use a choreographer in City Hall.
