Imagine this scenario... you are in charge of a residential property, as either a board member or a managing agent. One of your residents has just advised you that the lock on the front door of the building has been known to malfunctio…
Each year, our representatives in the New York State Legislature propose, debate, and ultimately pass or reject scores of laws and pieces of legislation. This issue of The Cooperator is devoted to the legal and legislative issue…
While most residential buildings in the city are either purely rental or purely co-op/condo, there are many co-op and condo buildings that are home to rental tenants. This usually is the result of the building converting from rental to…
When it comes to something as valuable as the place we call home, almost any dispute has the potential to turn into a legal crisis—and that goes double for New Yorkers. For tenants and landlords, these issues usually arise over problem…
It may sound like an oxymoron, but in the world of co-ops there is such a thing as “bad income.” The federal tax code requires that cooperative buildings receive at least 80 percent of their income from their shareholders—usually in th…
This is a transitional time for the New York City Council. This year, there is a new City Council Speaker in the person of Christine Quinn, a Democrat from District 3 on Manhattan’s Lower West Side who, since becoming speaker, has anno…
Considering that she’s still a few months away from turning 40, Christine Quinn, Speaker of the New York City Council, has achieved a great deal in politics and is thought of as the second most powerful figure in city government, after…
It took a rally, a march up Park Avenue, and some heated late-night negotiation sessions, but on April 21, 2006, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 32BJ and the Realty Advisory Board (RAB) were able to compromise on…
New York State has a number of laws to protect consumers—there’s a law designed to protect people who invest in a car and end up with a lemon, for example. If a car has been in a serious accident, the seller has to disclose that inform…
They say that two heads are better than one—but what about eight? It seems that when a group of people in the same line of work get together to discuss what they do and how they do it, they often come away with new information, fresh p…