The passage of Administrative Code §7-210 altered New York City’s common law duty to maintain its sidewalks in reasonably safe condition. As of its effective date, Sept. 14, 2003, the Sidewalk Law shifted responsibility for sidewalk maintenance and liability arising from a breach of this duty from the City to abutting property owners. There are exceptions where the abutting property is an owner-occupied one to three family residential property or where the City is the property owner. The law has now been construed in numerous decisions of the various Appellate Division courts and in two significant decisions by the Court of Appeals. In this column, we will focus on the most recent Court of Appeals decision in Sangaray v. West River Associates, 26 N.Y. 3d 793 (2016), regarding the law and its likely impact going forward.

Sangaray addressed the circumstances under which multiple landowners could be held liable for an accident on a sidewalk abutting the property of only one such owner. In earlier decisions, the First and Second Departments generally found that only the landowner in front of whose property the plaintiff had fallen could be held liable. However, in Sangaray, the Court of Appeals made it clear that the statute does not preclude a finding of negligence against other property owners as well, where their negligence and breach of the duty to maintain their own sidewalk is a proximate cause of the accident.

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