From The Manhattan Institute's City-Journal Magazine, Spring 2022 edition:
One-of-a-kind regulations illustrate why it’s so hard to build anything in Gotham
New York is a city unlike any other in many ways—one of the less distinguished being its one-of-a-kind building-construction regulations. Though typically justified on safety grounds, these regulations provide only questionable safety benefits and, in some cases, may be counterproductive, while considerably raising the cost of new construction. There has never been a better time to revisit these rules, as most New Yorkers now recognize the extreme expense of housing—a problem worsened by expensive construction—as one of the city’s greatest challenges.
Two aspects of this regulatory environment are particularly egregious. First, New York State liability law—above all, a law that lets injured workers sue employers for millions of dollars, even for accidents caused by their own recklessness—makes construction far more expensive and harder to insure. Second, an onerous system of crane regulations, without parallel elsewhere in the United States, entrenches the power of a corrupt local union and forces independent building firms to resort to inefficient, dangerous construction methods.....
***[skipping past the discussion of the Scaffold Law]***
....If the Scaffold Law is a unique presence in New York, a unique absence also plays a major role: in New York City, construction of all but the tallest buildings seldom uses cranes. In other cities (including elsewhere in New York State), cranes are commonly used even on buildings of only a few stories. Builders in New York City who do use cranes, furthermore, tend to avoid “tower cranes” embedded in the ground in favor of mobile cranes mounted on trucks or Caterpillar tracks. Mobile cranes tend to have inferior reach and lifting capacity to tower cranes, and they occupy a larger ground footprint, making them impractical for small sites and often necessitating closing streets. They are also less stable and prone to collapse in high winds, as in a fatal 2016 collapse of a large track-mounted “crawler” crane in Tribeca.
More commonly, builders without cranes resort to hauling heavy construction materials up construction sites by hand, exhausting laborers and wasting time while also reducing safety. The levels of a construction site, like those of a ship, are ordinarily connected by ladders through narrow openings in floors—fine if workers are transporting only themselves, but dangerous if they are carrying heavy construction materials. Safe transport of heavy loads without cranes necessitates expensive construction-site redesigns such as continuous stairways from the ground to the construction deck.
Another common solution in New York: portable “spider cranes”—consisting of a boom several feet long attached to a tetrapod—which can be carried up to a construction deck by hand and then bolted down near the edge, so that the boom projects off the side of the building. Spider cranes, though, have low load limits and are prone to accidents when rushed workers overload them. In 2018, two workers were seriously injured on a construction site in Harlem when a spider crane toppled over: it was rated for 880 pounds, according to a contemporaneous report in the New York Post, but was being used to haul a 1,500-pound load. (Tower cranes, by comparison, typically have load limits of at least several tons.)....
....MUCH MORE
It's a racket. Politicians, bureaucrats and union bosses all working together to feather their nests while workers and ultimately the average citizen get screwed.
- "Why New York City Stopped Building Subways"
- "How much do construction costs matter? Some factors that affect the price of housing"
- Revolt of the Bondholders: Lessons from Tammany Hall
- The Future of New York: The Panic Attack of Realty Power Brokers
- Exposed--An Explicit Full Frontal View of What's Really Going On In Big Cities: Money, Sex and Power
- "How cities will fossilise"
