NEW YORK, N.Y. — September 24, 2025. The New York Times recently addressed a common and frustrating issue for city dwellers: the persistence of sidewalk sheds and scaffolding on their buildings for years on end, well past the completion of necessary work. The feature, “Ask Real Estate,” explored the legal and practical steps tenants can take to force landlords to remove the structures.
In the piece, Woods Lonergan attorney Logan Lowe, of the firm’s Real Estate and Cooperative Condo Board Governance Practice Groups, offered expert context on the new enforcement avenues available to tenants who are dealing with this prolonged nuisance.
“For many residents, chronic scaffolding is a perpetual nuisance, but new laws have given the city ‘more tools in the toolbox’ for enforcement. Tenants, especially those in stabilized units, now have a clearer path to challenge these delays by leveraging both the Department of Buildings and state housing authorities.”
The New York Times article outlines the key steps residents can take, noting that recent legislative changes empower the Department of Buildings (DOB) to take more aggressive action against property owners who fail to complete necessary work and promptly remove the sheds. The piece emphasizes that with proper guidance, tenants can successfully hold their landlords accountable for maintaining safe and unobscured building access.
For more than 30 years, Woods Lonergan PLLC has specialized in complex commercial litigation across a variety of industries and sectors, with a deep real estate bench and a robust co-op and condominium board governance practice throughout New York City’s five boroughs. We represent boards, sponsors, managing agents, buyers, and sellers in high-stakes disputes and related transactions, including construction and property-damage claims, contract and fiduciary-duty actions, building-operations issues, and appeals. Contact our lawyers today.
Logan Lowe is an attorney at Woods Lonergan PLLC and an MAI designated appraiser. He litigates real estate development and construction disputes and the asset litigation that runs alongside them, for the developers, sponsors, investors, and lenders behind New York metro projects, in matters from $1 million to $100 million and above. Over the past twenty years he has been involved in some of the largest air rights transfers across the five boroughs.
His work covers development and joint-venture disputes, construction defect and delay, mechanic's liens, ground-lease and construction-loan fights, and air rights and development rights, together with ownership and control of property, commercial lease enforcement, and distressed real estate. Because he is also an appraiser, he builds the highest-and-best-use and income analysis that decides what a contested asset is worth. He also counsels technology, SaaS, and AI companies and middle-market and emerging businesses on corporate structure, investor arrangements, and governance. He represents them in the disputes that follow, frequently against substantially larger counterparties: founder and investor disputes, fiduciary claims among directors and shareholders, commercial and vendor agreements, trade secret and intellectual property claims, and equity and compensation disputes with departing executives.
The New York Real Estate Journal named Logan to its 2026 Ones to Watch: Innovators in Commercial Real Estate. Woods Lonergan is ranked in Chambers USA: Spotlight New York for Litigation: General Commercial and Real Estate, 2026 and 2027. He is one of roughly 6,300 practicing appraisers worldwide who hold one of the Appraisal Institute's commercial designations, and is admitted in New York and in the federal district courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.
Logan has been quoted in The New York Times. He has served as an associate editor and monthly columnist for eSecurities, an e-commerce magazine distributed by the American Bar Association and Leader Publications, and his work has been published nationally in CNET.com. He presented An Overview of Moral Rights in the United States at the Third Annual Art and Law Seminar at the Maison du Barreau in Paris, sponsored by the Bar Associations of Paris, Barcelona, and Málaga.
Disclaimer: The information in this article and blog post (“post”) is provided for informational purposes only, and may not reflect the current law(s) in every jurisdiction. No information contained in this post should be construed as legal advice from Woods Lonergan PLLC or the individual author(s), nor is it intended to be a substitute for legal counsel on any subject matter. Nothing herein shall be construed to create an attorney-client relationship with Woods Lonergan PLLC. No reader of this post should act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information included in, or accessible through, this Post without seeking the appropriate legal or other professional advice on the particular facts and circumstances at issue from an attorney licensed in the recipient’s jurisdiction. This post is attorney advertising.
