FISP / Local Law 11: A Brooklyn Owner's Guide to Facade Inspections

If you own a building in New York City that stands more than six stories tall, the city requires you to have its exterior walls professionally inspected and reported to the Department of Buildings on a recurring cycle. That program is the Facade Inspection Safety Program (FISP), and almost everyone in the industry still calls it Local Law 11.

For most of the Brooklyn owners we work with, the honest headline is: this probably doesn't apply to you. Yak Management's portfolio is concentrated in two-unit brownstones through roughly sixty-unit apartment buildings, and the great majority of that stock is under the height threshold. But when a building does cross it, FISP becomes one of the most financially consequential compliance obligations an owner has — not because of the inspection fee, but because of what an "Unsafe" classification sets in motion.

Here's how the program actually works, and what it costs owners who handle it badly.

The six-story rule is the whole test

FISP applies to buildings greater than six stories. That's it. There's no unit-count trigger, no square-footage trigger, and no rent-regulation trigger. A six-story walk-up is out. A seven-story elevator building is in.

This matters because owners frequently mis-self-assess in both directions. Some assume that because their building is large, old, or has a masonry facade, they must be covered — and spend money on inspections they don't owe. Others assume that because their building "isn't a high-rise," they're exempt, and discover otherwise when a penalty appears on the property record.

If you're unsure, don't guess based on how the building feels. Confirm the story count as DOB records it, since the certificate of occupancy and the building's actual configuration don't always agree — particularly on older Brooklyn properties that have been altered over the decades.

Five-year cycles, staggered by block

FISP runs in five-year cycles. Within each cycle, covered buildings are divided into sub-cycles — commonly labeled A, B, and C — determined by the block the building sits on. Each sub-cycle has its own filing window inside the larger five-year period.

The practical consequence: there is no single citywide FISP deadline. Two covered buildings a few blocks apart can owe their filings in different years. Owners who know "it's every five years" but not which sub-cycle they're in are the ones who file late.

Your building's sub-cycle and current filing window are published by the Department of Buildings. Look yours up rather than working from a date someone gave you verbally, and note it somewhere durable — five years is long enough that institutional memory fails, especially if the building changes hands or changes managers mid-cycle.

Only a QEWI can file it

The inspection must be performed by a Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector (QEWI) — a New York State licensed professional engineer or registered architect who meets DOB's experience criteria. The QEWI files the report with the Department of Buildings under their own license.

This is not a formality you can shortcut. A contractor's assessment, a roofer's opinion, or a managing agent's walkthrough has no standing under FISP. When owners call us mid-cycle in a panic, the first question is always whether a QEWI has been engaged, because everything downstream depends on that filing.

A close inspection typically requires physical access to the facade — a scaffold drop, a swing stage, or equivalent — not just observation from the street. That access requirement is part of why FISP inspections take planning and can't be arranged the week before a deadline.

Safe, SWARMP, and Unsafe

Every FISP report classifies the facade into one of three conditions, and the difference between them is where the money lives.

SWARMP is the classification owners underestimate. It reads as "safe," so it gets filed away. But it carries a correction date, and a SWARMP condition that goes unaddressed tends to reappear at the next inspection as an Unsafe condition — now with a shed attached and a repair that has had five more years to get worse and more expensive.

The sidewalk shed is the real cost

When a facade is filed Unsafe, public protection goes up right away. In practice that means a sidewalk shed — the scaffolding tunnel over the sidewalk that has become a permanent feature of the New York streetscape.

Sheds are rented by the month. They stay up until the repair is complete and the condition is re-filed as resolved. And because facade repair on an occupied building requires engineering, permitting, contractor scheduling, and often financing, the gap between "shed goes up" and "shed comes down" is regularly measured in years rather than months.

For an owner, this is the part worth internalizing: the cumulative shed rental can exceed the cost of the masonry repair it's protecting. It also degrades the property — retail frontage disappears behind plywood, residential entrances get dark, ground-floor units lose light, and leasing suffers. If you own a covered building, the cheapest possible FISP outcome is one where repairs are planned and executed before an inspection forces an Unsafe filing.

What we do for covered buildings

For the buildings in our portfolio that fall under FISP, compliance is a calendar problem before it's a construction problem. That means tracking the sub-cycle window well in advance, engaging a QEWI early enough that scaffold access can actually be scheduled, treating SWARMP conditions as work orders with real deadlines rather than paperwork, and making sure the owner sees the repair scope and cost while there is still time to plan it — not after a shed is already up and billing monthly.

For the much larger share of our portfolio that sits under the height threshold, we still inspect facades, parapets, and lintels on a routine basis. FISP doesn't require a filing on a four-story Bed-Stuy brownstone, but water getting behind the brick doesn't care what the law requires, and a failed lintel or a loose parapet coping can generate a DOB violation and a genuine liability exposure regardless of story count.

Where to verify the details

Facade compliance is one of those areas where the specifics — current cycle dates, sub-cycle assignments, filing fees, and penalty amounts — change over time and are set by the city, not by us. Rather than repeating figures that may be stale by the time you read this, confirm the current requirements directly with the NYC Department of Buildings for your specific property, and have your QEWI confirm your filing window before you plan the work.

If you own a taller Brooklyn building and you're not certain where you stand in the cycle, that's exactly the kind of thing worth resolving now rather than in the last quarter of a filing window. Schedule a property consultation and we'll walk through what your building actually owes.

This guide is general information for property owners, not legal or engineering advice. Facade compliance decisions should be made with a qualified engineer or architect and, where appropriate, counsel.