Plumbing is one of those things we take for granted yet without it, we might as well be back in the Stone Age. With dozens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people living in individual co-op and condo complexes, the importance of we…

Do you know what your problem is? More importantly, do you know if it’s actually your problem? In the world of condos and co-ops, understanding who is responsible for what in an apartment or in a building’s common areas isn’t always cle…

Technical advances are being made in just about every area of our lives, and it’s no wonder that residential buildings are taking advantage of what’s available to make life better, simpler and more economical. More and more buildings ar…

There are worse places to be than New York City in the winter — Minneapolis, for example, or Anchorage. Thanks to the North Atlantic current, the Big Apple doesn’t tend to freeze as hard as some other northern cities, but it still gets…

“Up On the Roof” is the title of a famous 1960s song by The Drifters about two New York inner-city lovers who go up to the roof just to get away from the “hustling crowd.” There’s a lot of romantic connotation to New York City’s rooft…

They say that it takes a village to raise a child. If that’s true, then it takes even more than that to keep the thousands of New York City co-ops and condominium building communities solvent, harmonious, and informed. With all its poten…

You know you’re living in a hot neighborhood when people from Manhattan visit the area to sample the restaurants and shopping. That’s exactly the status enjoyed by Park Slope, Brooklyn, the area under the south side of Prospect Park tha…

The Business Corporation Law, or BCL, is one of the primary statutes regulating operation of cooperative housing corporations. The BCL was implemented over a century ago, and remained more or less unchanged until it was overhauled in 19…

The lobbies and hallways of residential buildings are not high-end private residential projects—yet they’re not back stairwells or utilities spaces either. They literally fall somewhere in between, and no matter how new or sophisticated…

As an attorney who represents co-op boards, building managers and shareholders, one sometimes wonders if the expression—“ You can’t please all the people all of the time” best applies to the idea of creating harmony between these partie…