Being told to fix a sidewalk and being on the hook when someone trips on it are two different legal questions. Most people hear them as one. Cities do not. They answer them in separate code sections, and a city can hand you the repair bill without handing you the lawsuit. New York City is the clearest documented case in our records of a city that does both.
New York City: two code sections, same direction
The NYC Department of Transportation cites two distinct sections of the Administrative Code, and it matters a great deal which one you are looking at.
Admin Code § 19-152 is the repair duty. Per DOT: "Property owners are responsible for installing, repairing and maintaining sidewalks adjoining their properties."
Admin Code § 7-210 is the civil liability. Per DOT: "Property owners are potentially liable for personal injuries caused by their failure to maintain the sidewalk free of defects."
One says fix it. The other says the cost of not fixing it can be far greater than the concrete. The full citations and source are on the New York sidewalk repair record.
The exemption most homeowners need to check
Section 7-210 is reported to carve out certain owner-occupied one-, two-, and three-family residential properties from the injury-liability half of the rule. If you own and live in a small residential building in New York City, that carve-out is the single most important sentence in the statute for you, and it is worth confirming against the current text of § 7-210 before you assume either way.
Now notice what the exemption does not touch. It is written into the liability section, not the repair section. The § 19-152 duty to repair and maintain is a separate obligation with its own enforcement. Being exempt from the lawsuit does not exempt you from the concrete.
The 75-day clock
NYC DOT inspects sidewalks and issues violation notices. If the owner does not repair within 75 days of the notice, DOT may hire a contractor to do the work and bill the owner for it.
The invoice may be the smaller problem. Think about what that piece of paper actually is: a dated record that the city told you about a specific defect, at a specific address, on a specific day. If someone is later injured on that exact spot, the notice still exists and it is findable.
Do not assume your city works the same way
New York pairs owner repair duty with owner injury liability. That is not the national rule. The two questions get decided independently, city by city and state by state, and plenty of places assign repair duty to the owner without sending the injury liability along with it. Some cities go the other direction entirely. Nashville's transportation department takes responsibility for the city's sidewalks, and Boston splits the question by whether your address sits on a public or a private way.
For your address, read your own city's code. If real money or a real injury is involved, ask a lawyer licensed in your state. This site documents what municipal codes say. It does not tell you how a court will rule on your facts.
Where to look in your own code
Liability language often sits in the same chapter as the repair duty rather than off in a separate part of the code, so read the whole chapter before you conclude it is not there. Oakland's is the plain version: Chapter 12.22 of the municipal code is titled "Property Owner Responsibility and Liability for Sidewalk Safety and Maintenance," with liability named right in the chapter heading alongside the maintenance duty.
New York is the opposite arrangement, and it is the more useful one to understand. The repair duty and the injury liability live in two different titles of the Administrative Code, § 19-152 and § 7-210. That separation is exactly why one of them can carry an exemption the other does not.
What to do about it
If you are buying: ask whether the address has an open sidewalk violation, and get the answer with a date on it. In owner-duty cities the defect and its paper trail come with the property.
If you are selling: disclose a known defect. An undisclosed hazard you already had notice of is a worse problem than the repair would have been.
If you have a notice in hand: start the clock from the notice date, not from when you get around to calling contractors. In New York that clock is 75 days, after which the city can do the work and send you the invoice.
Start with your own city's rule before you assume anything from this page applies: browse by issue.