Temporary scaffolding seems to be a permanent fixture of New York life. These metal and wood structures are thrown up quickly, in a matter of days or even hours, but their average lifespan is 495 days, according to data from New York City’s department of buildings.
But averages are always pesky because they can be so misleading. So I downloaded the dataset to take a closer look at the age of all 8,875 scaffolding projects that exist around New York (the dataset is kept very up to date so these numbers are from this month).
