Five years is a long time for a filing cabinet
A cyclical facade ordinance is not really an inspection problem. The examination itself is a well-understood piece of engineering. The part that goes wrong is the four and a half years between filings, when the only record of what was found, what was repaired, and what was deferred lives in a PDF on somebody's laptop and a folder of photographs nobody has opened since.
Then the next cycle opens, often with a different engineer, and the building starts again from a blank sheet. The conditions that were classified as safe-with-a-repair-and-maintenance-programme last time are the ones most likely to be quietly reclassified the same way this time, which is exactly the outcome the rule exists to prevent.
Four cities, each in its own words
The platform ships the classification vocabulary of each jurisdiction as that jurisdiction writes it, rather than a generic three-way traffic light mapped onto all of them:
- New York City — the Facade Inspection Safety Program under 1 RCNY 103-04. Safe, SWARMP, and Unsafe, with the sub-cycle derived from the last digit of the tax block and the Cycle 10 filing windows computed rather than looked up.
- Chicago — the critical examination requirement of 14A-6-603.
- Boston — the periodic inspection of exterior walls under 9-9.12.
- Philadelphia — the exterior wall inspection required by PM-315.
The rule that catches people out
In New York a condition reported as SWARMP is a promise: it will be repaired before the next cycle. Reporting the same condition as SWARMP a second time is not a continuation, it is a broken promise, and the record has to show which of those two things happened.
Because every examination is filed against the building rather than the job, the platform can look back at what the last cycle actually said about this location and tell the engineer of record, before the report is signed, that this condition has been deferred once already. That is a question no filing cabinet answers and no single-cycle report can.
The arithmetic, computed and shown
- Sub-cycle assignment from the tax block, so a building lands in A, B or C without anyone counting on their fingers.
- Filing window for the current cycle, with the opening and closing dates, so a late filing is a visible fact rather than a surprise.
- Minimum close-up examinations for the elevation, derived from its length — and shown with the derivation, not as a bare number.
- Roll-up from individual conditions to the elevation and the building, using the worst classification present, which is how the filing itself is graded.
What the owner gets that they did not have before
A permanent, per-building record of every cycle: the photographs at full resolution, the conditions with their classifications, the repairs that closed them, and the sealed report as filed. When the building is sold, refinanced, or litigated, that record is the asset. When the next cycle opens, the engineer starts from the last one instead of from nothing.