Imagine a city without endless scaffolding darkening what feels like every building and every block. A city without mentally ill people scaring you on the streets and subway. A city without illegal weed shops still dotting far too many corners. A city where you don’t have to ask someone to unlock a plastic case just to buy a tube of toothpaste. A city where bikes aren’t crashing down the sidewalks or the wrong way on streets and bike lanes. A city that feels orderly, controlled, manageable. Well, the good news is, legislation is finally pending in the City Council that would take on one of the biggest problems on this list: scaffolding. New York is overwhelmed by scaffolding. It’s estimated that if we took all of the scaffolding and stretched it from end to end, it’d run all the way from Manhattan to Montreal — nearly 400 miles. New Yorkers are sick of it. A recent poll commissioned by my foundation, Tusk Philanthropies, found that 77% of New Yorkers want new scaffolding laws compared to just 8% who like things the way they are. Even more, 80%, say scaffolding causes maintenance costs to go up for renters and homeowners, is bad for retail businesses, and encourages problems like drug use, homeless encampments and safety threats. In the poll, 68% say that the period that buildings should perform work and inspections should be shortened and the length of time between inspections lengthened. You don’t even need data to know the answer: just talk to anyone and ask how they feel about all of the scaffolding. And the problem isn’t just aesthetic. Worse things happen under scaffolds than in broad daylight. More homeless tents. More public urination and defecation. More drug use. More drug sales. More violence. Life in a city of endless scaffolds simply isn’t as safe. We shouldn’t have to live this way. Thanks to a legislative package sponsored by Councilman Keith Powers with strong backing from Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the dreaded Local Law 11 — which mandates all the current scaffolding rules — may finally be changed. The three bills aim to reduce the amount of time scaffolding can remain in place, allows for alternative methods to scaffolding, streamlines the permitting process for inspections to reduce their duration and enables further improvements to Local Law 11 inspection timelines. Together, the bills incentivize landlords to engage in proactive maintenance of their buildings so that fewer inspections are needed and they improve the look of sheds to better blend in with our communities. If passed, we avoid scaffolding when we don’t truly need it, get scaffolding down faster and make it less obtrusive while it is up. And while Local Law 11 has managed to remain unchanged for far too long, the good news is, politically, the scaffolding industry is not all powerful, so they can’t singlehandedly block progress. Still, the Council must pass the bills. That’s why it’s so critical that Speaker Adrienne Adams bring the legislative package to a vote and finally solve a problem that’s a leading cause of our quality of life woes (my foundation is providing funding and political resources to help mobilize support for the bill). So far, the speaker has resisted fixing the problem despite clear support from her members and across City Hall in the mayor’s office. It’s difficult to understand why. Fixing the scourge of scaffolding alone won’t get our city to the level of safety and cleanliness we deserve. But when you combine the scaffolding bill with the strong efforts by the mayor and Gov. Hochul to change our laws on involuntary confinement to make it easier to take people who are a harm to themselves and to others off the subways and streets, combined with the mayor’s promising efforts to date on closing illegal weed shops, and combined with what promises to be a heavy focus on quality of life (and the root causes for why it has declined over the past decade) in the mayoral race, there’s real reason for optimism. Yes, living in New York always requires making tradeoffs. In return for living in the greatest city in the world, you deal with costs and headaches you might not face elsewhere. But good laws and good government can mitigate those costs and minimize those headaches. And that’s exactly what the Powers scaffolding bill does. Speaker Adams, it’s time to make it law. Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist and philanthropist.