The sitting president of a Connecticut condo board recently approached the property manager with a proposition: If he saw to it that her contractor boyfriend was awarded certain jobs in the building, the property manager would receive …
One of the most important recurring themes Cooperator readers are likely to encounter in these pages is that of communication; between board and manager, between building administrators and residents, and between neighbors. When commun…
Board members find themselves acting as referees so often, some may feel like they're wearing black-and-white striped shirts. Maybe they're mired in the middle of a conflict between homeowners because one group of gardening enthusiasts…
The job of a co-op or condo board member seems pretty straightforward: have meetings, take votes on this or that item of business, approve checks, keep an eye on the budget, and so forth. That’s the administrative part of the …
Aniello DeGuida is the resident manager of The Cocoa Exchange condo building in Manhattan's Financial District just a stone’s throw from Ground Zero, so he’s very aware of the importance of having an emergency plan in place for his resi…
Every condo and co-op has its own set of governing documents by which building administrators direct their community's day-to-day business. Bylaws, rules and regulations, and precedent-setting legal cases help keep boards within the le…
As the harmful effects of cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke have become more widely publicized and acknowledged, anti-smoking campaigns have gained traction across the country. Cigarette commercials have been banned from TV and ra…
New Yorkers are used to their fair share of urban wildlife. There are the famed New York City cockroaches, of course. And mice and rats are expected in any gritty city. But the proliferation of bedbugs is a phenomenon that has gained a …
Most of the multifamily, residential buildings found in large cities are either co-ops or condos, and most are run the way co-ops and condos across the country are run. But if you dig a little deeper in here in New York City, you’ll fin…
Tucked away in the northernmost top of Brooklyn, Greenpoint is a historic New York neighborhood bordered on the southwest by Williamsburg at the Bushwick inlet, on the southeast by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and East Williamsburg, …
Q My mother recently passed away and I inherited her shares in a Mitchell-Lama co-op building. It's taken quite some time to run down the paperwork, and make preparations to empty the unit, and the building management has not been at al…
Q Our board president recently made a statement that "our building is essentially controlled by the building Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 32BJ." What does this mean? Are there some sort of documents to accompany…