NYC Facade Inspections: How Many Buildings Are Unsafe?

Of the 16,400 buildings with a filing in New York City's last complete facade inspection cycle (Cycle 9), 1,471 are listed as Unsafe today, or 9.0%. Another 5,901 are rated SWARMP (safe now, but needing repairs), and 2,220 buildings (13.5%) show no inspection report filed at all. Brooklyn and the Bronx have the highest Unsafe shares; Manhattan has by far the most buildings in the program.

How the facade program works

Under Local Law 11 and the city's Facade Inspection and Safety Program (FISP), owners of buildings higher than six stories must have their exterior walls and attached features inspected every five years and file a technical report with the Department of Buildings. A licensed inspector (a Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector, or QEWI) gives the facade one of three ratings (source: DOB Façade & Local Law):

• Safe: no repair or maintenance needed to keep the exterior structurally sound.
• SWARMP (Safe With A Repair and Maintenance Program): safe at inspection, but needs repairs or maintenance during the next five years.
• Unsafe: hazardous to people or property. The owner must put up protection such as a sidewalk shed right away, and DOB says unsafe conditions must be repaired within 90 days of filing the report, then an amended report filed within two weeks.

Cycle 9 ran from February 21, 2020 to February 20, 2025 (see the DOB Cycle 9 diagram) and is the most recent finished cycle. Cycle 10 began on February 21, 2025 and runs to 2030, with buildings split into sub-cycles by the last digit of their tax block (see the DOB Cycle 10 diagram). To find your building's window, use our facade cycle checker.

Status by borough

Manhattan accounts for 9,100 of the 16,400 buildings in Cycle 9, or 55.5%, because that is where most buildings over six stories are. So Manhattan leads every raw count, including 753 Unsafe facades. Measured as a share of each borough's buildings, Brooklyn has the highest Unsafe rate (12.3%), followed by the Bronx (11.0%). Queens has the lowest, 5.7%.

Missing reports follow a different pattern. In Staten Island, 27.0% of buildings in the program show no report filed, and in the Bronx it is 24.7%, compared with 8.6% in Manhattan. A building with no report has an unknown facade condition on the public record, which is a separate risk from a known Unsafe rating.

Cycle by cycle

The dataset covers Cycles 6 through 10. The number of buildings with a filing grew each cycle, from 12,551 in Cycle 6 to 16,400 in Cycle 9. The dataset does not say why, so treat the growth as a change in DOB's records, not necessarily in the number of tall buildings. Buildings currently listed Unsafe went from 697 in Cycle 8 to 1,471 in Cycle 9, and buildings with no report filed went from 782 to 2,220.

Be careful comparing cycles. The status is a current snapshot, not the rating on the original report. Owners of older Unsafe buildings have had years to repair and file amended reports that change the status to Safe or SWARMP, so earlier cycles will naturally show fewer Unsafe buildings. In Cycle 9, 3,358 buildings had at least one filing rated Unsafe at some point, more than twice the 1,471 still listed Unsafe now.

Cycle 10 so far

Cycle 10 is early: 2,830 buildings have filed, about 17.3% of the Cycle 9 count. 200 of those filings had no current status in the data yet. Of the 1,471 buildings still listed Unsafe from Cycle 9, 485 already have a Cycle 10 filing. Early filers are not a random sample, so don't read the Cycle 10 shares as a forecast for the whole cycle.

Penalties on the record

DOB's filing data has three penalty fields. Across Cycle 9 buildings, the records show $260.8 million in late-filing penalties (10,937 buildings), $151.6 million for failure to file (7,199 buildings) and $200.1 million for failure to correct unsafe conditions (3,629 buildings). These are amounts written on the filings. The dataset does not say whether they were paid, reduced or waived, so they are not a measure of money collected.

Limits of this data

• The dataset lists filings, not buildings. We counted each building (BIN) once per cycle using the status on its latest filing. The raw file has 87,382 rows, and adding up row-level statuses would double-count buildings.
• "No report filed" comes from DOB's auto-generated records. It means DOB's system has no accepted report, not that the facade is unsafe.
• A building can have several facades. The status here is the building-level status DOB records.
• An Unsafe status can lag reality: repairs may be done before the amended report is filed and accepted.
• Statuses change every weekday as DOB updates the dataset. This snapshot is from 2026-10-12.