The entrance of the collapsed parking garage in Lower Manhattan, April 2023. Buildings will require parking structure owners to submit initial observation reports and engineering reports to ensure parking structures citywide do not face similar tragic results. Image Credits: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office.
On January 18, 2024, the Department of Buildings announced that over 400 property owners had received initial penalties for failing to submit required engineering inspection reports for parking structures located on their properties. Through the Periodic Inspection for Parking Structure (PIPS) program, 1,056 properties in Lower Manhattan, Midtown, and the Upper West Side were required to submit inspection reports to the Department of Buildings before January 1, 2024.
According to Buildings, 62 percent of property owners in the specified areas complied with the requirements; the remaining owners have already received a $1,000 fine for failing to meet the first deadline. The $1,000 penalty will be issued monthly until a report is submitted. If property owners have not complied by the end of the year, an additional $5,000 penalty will be imposed.
Parking structures in other parts of the city will also need to submit PIPS reports based on a timeline cycle where a report must be submitted for each structure every six years. The reports are part of the Construction Code revision process, and this requirement was first implemented in January 2022.
Following a parking structure collapse in Lower Manhattan in April 2023 that killed one garage manager, Buildings moved up the reporting timeline requirements for 3,317 parking structures located in Upper Manhattan and the other boroughs. Originally, structures in Upper Manhattan, the Upper East Side, and all of Brooklyn needed to submit their first reports by December 31, 2025, and parking structures in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island needed to submit reports by December 2027. In response to the April 2023 collapse, these areas will now need to submit an initial observation report to Buildings by August 1, 2024 in addition to the 2025 and 2027 report fillings. This initial observation report encourages property owners to investigate the structural condition of their parking structures and identify safety hazards earlier.
The Department of Buildings is currently reviewing the submitted PIPS reports and accepted reports will be uploaded to the DOB NOW Public Portal. The agency also has a real-time PIPS map that shows the PIPS submission cycles citywide. For additional transparency, Buildings has additional interactive tools and analytic maps available for building facades, major construction projects, after hours projects, and sidewalk sheds.
DOB Commissioner Jimmy Oddo stated, “These inspection reports for parking structures are not just more paperwork for property owners, they are a powerful new tool to protect the public against hazardous building conditions. I am happy to see that most of these property owners are complying with the law, and many are taking steps to repair their buildings. For those who have not lived up to this legal responsibility, get those late reports in as soon as possible because monthly penalties have already started, and will continue to rack up until we get compliance.”
By: Veronica Rose (Veronica is the Editor of CityLand and a New York Law School graduate, Class of 2018.)