Local Law 11 of 1998 required the inspection and maintenance of facades of buildings greater than 6 stories tall.  Owners must have an architect or engineer inspect all facades of the building (including inner facades not seen from the street).

The façade inspections are required every five years and Cycle 7 starts this Sunday!

There is a staggered, 1-2 year window to file.  The timing depends on the last digit of the building’s block number.

The timing is as follows:

Last week, the monitor overseeing the settlement rejected the county’s affordable-housing plan, saying it was deficient on details, accountability and enforcement. Instead of specifying what the county would do to meet certain desegregation bench marks, Westchester merely restated the bench marks. The plan didn’t specify where and how the money would be spent. It had no “concrete time frame” for finding and buying properties to develop and was “unnecessarily vague on the whole.” (more…)

Earlier this week, the Green Codes Task Force – a group convened in July 2008 by Mayor Bloomberg and Council Speaker Quinn to review the regulations affecting buildings and provide suggestions on amending these regulations to promote sustainability – released their report.

The report covers a wide array of topics, ranging from health and toxicity to energy and water to urban ecology.

The recommendations suggest changes to the general approach to new construction and existing buildings.  Additionally, specific changes to the building code and zoning regulation are suggested.

Some tangible changes that the Task Force recommends are: (more…)

Recently, residents of the co-op at 233 East 69th Street, where eight households would have their east-facing windows completely blocked by a proposed ventilation structure, filed litigation against the MTA and FTA. The suit claims that the MTA’s 2004 Final Environmental Impact Statement promised that the ventilation structures “would typically be approximately the same size as a typical row house—25 feet wide, 75 feet deep, and four- to five-stories high, although some may be wider,” and that they “could be designed to appear like a neighborhood row house in height, scale, materials and colors.” The Suit claims that now the MTA is planning on building structures as tall as 10 stories with facades made from a “utilitarian mix of translucent white glass, steel louvers and ceramic tile.” (more…)

Map courtesy of Westchestertowns.com

Following the historic civil rights settlement between HUD and Westchester County (blogged about previously), Westchester County has submitted its implementation plan to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and to the federal monitor overseeing the county’s compliance with last year’s settlement of the fair and affordable housing lawsuit. (more…)