-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
Let’s say you drive over a pothole in front of your house in Denver and call the city. They come fix it within a few days. Problem solved.
Now let’s say the problem is the sidewalk in front of your house. You call the city again.
Until recently, city staff would have pointed you to their “Homeowner’s Do-It Yourself Guide for Hazardous Sidewalks,” where it clearly states that “sidewalk maintenance is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner.” This online document then says that if you the homeowner need to remove a tripping hazard from your sidewalk, you could rent a masonry rotary grinder from your local rental center.
Be sure to also get yourself some eye protection.
In most U.S. cities, a pothole is treated as a public problem, but a broken sidewalk — even one that blocks access — is treated as the homeowner’s problem.
It is not this way everywhere. In some older U.S. cities such as Boston and Washington, sidewalks have long been a public responsibility, the same as streets, water lines and sewers. But cities that grew up in a different era — or cities eager to offload maintenance and legal responsibility — treated sidewalks not as fundamental infrastructure but as an amenity tied to adjacent property.
More than three-quarters of the 30 most-populous U.S. cities take that same approach.
But not Denver — at least, not anymore. In 2022, the city changed its rules, because advocates got tired of waiting, organized and took the issue to the ballot. Denver allows citizens to initiate legislation, and the measure won handily, making sidewalks a public responsibility.
Denver ended up with a citywide sidewalk program funded through a fee on property owners, typically $150 per household per year, and managed by the city. Instead of trying to get individual homeowners to fix bad sidewalks one segment at a time, Denver now has a system — and funding — to repair, build and maintain sidewalks as a connected public network.
Los Angeles underscores the contradiction. The law in L.A. still says adjacent property owners are responsible for sidewalk maintenance, although after years of litigation, the city also runs a public repair program for larger sidewalk projects. (Los Angeles settled a disability-access lawsuit in 2016 by agreeing to invest $1.3 billion in sidewalk repairs and track the status of the walkways, but residents lament the near-impossibility of getting problems repaired.)
But most cities don’t even know which sidewalks need fixing.
Preparing to teach a course in 2009 about using digital maps to understand real-world problems, I dug into Denver’s data and came away impressed by the fact that they had a sidewalk layer, which is basically a digital map of the city’s paved walkways. However, unlike nearly every other dataset the city provided, the sidewalk one hadn’t been updated since 2004. The logic seemed to be that not documenting the problem could protect the city from liability. But sticking your head in the sand is not much of a long-term strategy.
There is no such hesitancy with cities collecting roadway data. Why should sidewalks be given similar priority? One reason is road safety.
Hoboken, N.J., has become the U.S. poster child for safe streets. Experts point to the success of interventions like curb extensions, high-visibility crosswalks, protected bike lanes and lowering the citywide speed limit.
But before all of that, Hoboken undertook a systematic effort to catalog its sidewalks and their condition. The city runs an annual sidewalk inspection program in which trained volunteers walk the sidewalks and record problems. Hoboken also developed a smartphone app so the inventory could be digitized instantly, including not just sidewalk defects but also things like burned-out pedestrian lights and damaged pedestrian signals.
Hoboken remains one of the many cities that put the onus to fix sidewalks onto adjacent property owners. Even so, Hoboken must be doing something right: It’s had nine consecutive years without a traffic fatality in a city of nearly 60,000 residents and with a daytime population of more than 90,000. Focusing on sidewalks first may be part of it the explanation.
Springfield, Ohio, also has nearly 60,000 residents. Yet the city suffered more than 50 road fatalities over the past nine years. The list of contributing factors is long, but sidewalks matter.
In fact, in Springfield’s 2024 community survey, residents cited the condition of sidewalks and streets as the city’s worst problem. Springfield is looking to fix its sidewalks, but its approach is painful: giving a property owner just 30 days to fix their own sidewalk, and then adding the repair costs to their property tax bill if they don’t. There has to be a better way. In fact, I’ve seen it up close.
The sidewalk in front of my house in Denver had some lips and dips that in another city or another era could’ve compelled me to rent heavy equipment and get to work. But the city came out and replaced it. Without my even asking.
So if you want to take a lesson from Denver, my city shows that making sidewalks a public responsibility is possible. And if you want to take a lesson from Hoboken to make your city safer, you can start with the humble sidewalk. Figure out where they are, and where they are not. Where they need to be repaired, and where they need to be replaced.
In other words, sidewalks come first.
Wes Marshall is a professor of civil engineering and construction at the University of Colorado Denver. This article was produced in partnership with the Conversation.
More to Read
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that sidewalks should be treated as core public infrastructure—on par with streets, water lines and sewers—rather than as optional amenities tied to adjacent property owners, pointing to Denver’s voter-approved program that shifted legal responsibility for repair and construction from homeowners to the city and funds a connected sidewalk network through a dedicated annual property fee, typically about $150 per household[7][4][12][11].
In making the case for municipal responsibility, the piece emphasizes that Denver’s citywide program allows sidewalks to be planned and managed as a continuous transportation network, with a Sidewalk Implementation Plan that systematically identifies where sidewalks are missing or substandard and directs long-term repair and widening work across the city, instead of relying on piecemeal fixes by individual owners[20][11][7].
The article contends that Denver’s change reflects a broader rethinking of sidewalks as a safety tool, not just a property feature, noting research that most large U.S. cities still require adjacent owners to fix the sidewalk, even though scholars and planners increasingly view sidewalks as part of the public transportation system that supports walking, accessibility and Vision Zero-style crash reduction strategies[12][18].
To illustrate how data and proactive inspections can improve safety, the piece highlights Hoboken, N.J., where the city conducts systematic sidewalk inspections and uses volunteers and digital tools to catalog defects, burned-out pedestrian lights and signal problems; this proactive focus on pedestrian infrastructure is presented as part of the context for Hoboken’s widely cited record of nine consecutive years without a traffic fatality, despite still placing much of the repair burden on property owners[18][13][16].
The article uses Los Angeles and Springfield, Ohio, as cautionary examples, noting that when cities formally assign maintenance to adjacent owners but lack robust, city-run programs, residents can face long delays and complex processes to get sidewalks fixed, even after large legal settlements or survey findings that highlight sidewalks as a top local problem, which in turn undermines accessibility for disabled residents and everyday pedestrians[2][8][6].
The piece suggests that models like Denver’s, which couple a dedicated funding stream, clear public responsibility and a citywide plan, offer a “better way” than approaches that give homeowners short deadlines and add repair costs to tax bills, arguing that such punitive systems are both politically unpopular and ineffective at delivering safe, continuous sidewalks across entire communities[7][6][12].
Finally, the article portrays Denver’s experience—where the city replaced the author’s hazardous sidewalk segment without any request—as evidence that once sidewalks are recognized as a public responsibility with stable funding, routine maintenance can be handled proactively by the city, reducing individual burdens and helping ensure that sidewalks remain passable and accessible for all users[11][7].
Different views on the topic
In contrast, many state laws and municipal ordinances explicitly place sidewalk repair and day‑to‑day upkeep on adjacent property owners, and legal analyses from city attorneys in California describe these “sidewalk liability ordinances” as a deliberate policy choice that adds an extra layer of responsibility for safety onto the owners whose property abuts the sidewalk, often with the goal of limiting municipal costs and exposure to lawsuits[15][18].
Supporters of the adjacent-property-owner model note that it remains the prevailing practice in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, where codes and guidance state that owners are responsible for maintaining and repairing sidewalks next to their property, and violations can trigger notices or orders to repair, reflecting a view that those who directly benefit from a sidewalk segment should bear primary responsibility for its condition[9][10][17].
Day‑to‑day maintenance requirements—such as Hoboken’s rules that property owners and occupants must promptly shovel snow and ice from sidewalks, curb cuts and ramps—are often defended as a practical necessity, with city communications emphasizing that relying on owners for routine tasks helps keep pedestrian routes passable more quickly than if municipal crews alone were responsible for every block after storms or minor hazards[3][16][18].
Some commentators and residents raise concerns about Denver’s new approach itself, with local news reports documenting complaints over the citywide fee and “unintended, unpopular consequences,” including damage to landscaping and sprinkler systems during construction and frustration that, even with the fee, full repairs could take decades, suggesting that shifting responsibility to the city does not automatically resolve tensions over fairness, implementation speed or neighborhood impacts[14][7].
Property-owner-focused programs such as Los Angeles’ Safe Sidewalks LA rebate system are promoted by city and contractor sources as giving residents more direct control: owners who are willing to hire licensed concrete contractors and pay upfront can obtain city rebates for repairs, and after a limited warranty period, responsibility returns to the owner, a structure that some see as a compromise between public oversight and private initiative[5][2][19][10].
Additionally, guides from transportation agencies note that in many jurisdictions, local governments rely on adjacent owners for routine tasks like snow removal, vegetation trimming and sweeping, and often charge or fine owners when the city has to step in; this practice is presented as a way to manage municipal budgets while still allowing governments to retain ultimate responsibility for major repairs and replacements when owners do not act[18][6].
Finally, critical perspectives from cities that have not adopted Denver’s model, such as Sacramento, argue that state law allows—but does not require—municipalities to treat sidewalks as a public responsibility, and some local commentary suggests that keeping maintenance obligations on individual owners remains more politically feasible in communities wary of new fees or city‑wide assessments, even if the trade‑off is a patchier and more uneven sidewalk network[1][15].
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently approved California’s request to extend housing assistance to survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires. But more than 18 months after those January 2025 fires, survivors are still waiting on an additional $16 billion in federal disaster relief from the federal government, which was revised down earlier this year from nearly $34 billion.
The Hillside Strangler murders terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The killers were a pair of sadistic cousins. One confessed. The other was set to stand trial—until L.A. prosecutors flinched.
Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
