2008 March
Focus on... Exterior Maintenance

You've got to hand it to city plants. They squeeze themselves into the tightest of spaces, and each day they battle pollution and smog, get stepped on (or worse, thanks to the city's dog owners) more times than they'd like to count.…

Being a co-op or condo owner often means multi-tasking—especially if you happen to serve on your building's board. To keep your home in good repair and to comply with Local Law 11 and other city building codes governing façade repai…

When you walk around busy areas of Manhattan, Brooklyn and elsewhere in the city these days, it's hard to miss the large number of structures stretching above the sidewalk, made up of huge sheets of wood resting on thin metal poles.…

To paraphrase the 1948 film, and later, television series of the same name, The Naked City, there are eight million stories in the naked city. And probably ten times that many signs. They are everywhere, all asking for our attenti…

As a child, we tried diligently to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk, because, after all, our mother's backs were hanging in the balance. As adults, we simply take sidewalks for granted, often not looking down and watching whe…

Spring means many things to many people—but for anyone involved in the tri-state area's residential real estate industry, The Cooperator's 21st Annual Co-op & Condo Expo—to be held this year on Tuesday, April 29th on three floors of the …

New York City is filled with exciting and inventive architectural styles. There are many different schools of thought represented in the dense mix of office, residential, and commercial buildings on the island of Manhattan and throu…

A Bergen County, New Jersey jury in November rendered a $1.3 million dollar verdict against a cooperative corporation and its management company for failing to remediate a longstanding water problem that led to mold growth and expos…

Water damage can wreak havoc on any co-op or condo. When it leads to serious problems like mold and structural damage, it can be a costly problem to address. To avoid the cost and hassle of dealing with water damage after the fact, …

As presidential candidates on the national scale rally around the idea of "it's time for a change," so too is the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB), rolling out its first major set of changes to the city's building code in 40 y…

Affordable apartments with fresh air, good light, and attractively landscaped grounds for middle-income people—those were the goods Park West Village was created to deliver in the late 1950s and early 1960s as part of a government-s…

Now that winter is drawing to a close, residential and commercial buildings will soon be switching their heating systems off and their air conditioning systems on. This is the ideal time of year to begin preparing your boiler for the nex…

The Dakota. The San Remo. The Ansonia. Greenwich Village. Gramercy Park. DUMBO. New York City and its five boroughs are home to buildings and neighborhoods that are celebrities in their own right, and preserving the historic character an…

My family and I have been living in Glen Oaks Village in Queens for over 25 years. Originally built for the families of soldiers returning after World War II, the garden-style cooperative community is one of the largest in the New Y…

The Cooperator headquarters in Midtown Manhattan again played host to a group of real estate industry professionals gathered to discuss their strategies and challenges, trade anecdotes (both the positive and not-so-positive), and me…

 The tenant below me smokes nonstop. Her windows are always fully open and the smoke travels directly into my  apartment above. My apartment smells like an ashtray and of course leaves us vulnerable to  second-hand smoke. Even with our wind…

I’m a president of a new condo and have no experience running one prior to this. There is an apartment in the condo that consistently has children dropped off. After some inquiry it turns out to be the children of relatives, around 4 or …

 My building has a rental apartment that was bought from a previous shareholder. Apparently, an amended document was not filed with the state attorney’s office, so there are still shares attached to this apartment. These shares were voted b…

The original condo declaration, bylaws, amendments and house rules allow for  renovations without board approval to interior units if they do not affect  common area are not structural in nature. I installed a wall partition (does  not affe…

 Certain shareholders in our building keep some personal belongings (i.e., bikes,  baby strollers, skates) in the hallways next to their apartments. Sometimes we  have to squeeze by their hallway clutter to get to our own units. Is there an…