Most of your buildings have a shareholder—or maybe two or three—who fit into a particular mold: you know, longer hair, Birkenstocks, vintage Woodstock t-shirts; or maybe yours has the $5,000 suit, $1,000 shoes, and starched attitude. Th…
Few things can be as upsetting as discovering that the funds that fuel a co-op or condo have been mishandled—or worse yet, stolen. For residents, fraud undermines their sense of trust in the men and women who oversee and manage the plac…
Every co-op and condo community has a board of directors in charge of governing the community’s finances, physical maintenance and other day-to-day business. Part of the board’s responsibility also is to keep the community fiscally soun…
Ari Meisel lives in a 4,000-square foot loft in a four-family co-op building in Soho—he also operates several green buildings, consulting and real estate businesses from the comfort of his own unit. He has lived in this building for his…
As the leaders of a private corporation in which shareholders own stock that entitles them to live in an apartment within the corporation’s building, residential co-op board members have a lot of responsibility. Along with this responsi…
Few board members would argue that the time spent serving their buildings and fellow residents can be both very strenuous and very rewarding. For years, they make decisions that affect their community in the present and may continue to …
For most people, “foaming at the mouth” is just a figure of speech. Attorney Ellen Hirsch de Haan, a managing partner in the Tampa Bay, Florida office of Becker & Poliakoff PA, has encountered the real thing—and not at an animal shelter,…
Just take a walk around the streets and parks of the city, and it’s easy to see that New Yorkers love their pets. But not everyone loves animals, of course—and this can be problematic when it comes to a board deciding if pets should be …
In early 2009, at the urging of President Barack Obama, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) with a view toward easing the blow dealt to the economy by what some are calling the Great Recession. The ARRA ha…
New York is often called a “vertical” city because its finite borders impose strict limits on expansion. In Manhattan particularly, the only way to build is up. This verticality goes both ways, however—for all the towering skyscrapers a…