Category: Q&A

Q. We have a president of our co-op board that has been president for almost 30 years because he collects proxies from the shareholders who will not attend the yearly meeting and uses them to either reelect himself or others that side wit…

Q. A co-op owner purchased her unit in 2005 and has been subleasing it to the same tenant since 2011. The co-op board recently passed an amendment to the bylaws that states an owner cannot sublease a unit for more than two years, and it a…

Q. This question is for my neighbor. We own shares in a co-op in Long Island. She has had extensive water damage and now has mold in her unit. She emails the property manager and president of board to no avail. It’s been like this for mon…

Q. A homeowner in a condo asks the board to allow the alteration of the balcony enclosure to a taller height. The board and management company agree and the alteration takes place. Twenty-five years later, a new manager says that was impr…

Q. I live in a condominium that consists of seven individual buildings all three- to four-family that is co-joined by another condominium on the same block. We are sharing a private sewer line with one connection out to the city sewer; th…

Q. I live on a second floor of a co-op condo. We would like to replace the current front windows with impact windows. The current old windows have a metal criss-cross ‘cathedral’ type design, and we would like to eliminate it. It looks ol…

Q: This question is on behalf of my neighbor. We own shares in a co-op in Long Island. She has had extensive water damage and now has mold in her unit. She emails the property manager and president of board to no avail. It’s been like this …

Q. Why are co-op board minutes so sparse that others who read them—shareholders, lawyers, brokers—have no real idea what goes on at meetings? This is because minutes are routinely ‘sanitized’ to leave out any troublesome issues, any comme…

Q. In 1999 I inherited a low-income HDFC co-op, which at that time the president told me I could rent out. When my relative passed away in 1998, I had just bought myself a condominium, so I took the president at his word and rented the co…

Q. What can be done when the president of the condo corporation verbally harasses the building’s superintendent?                   —Seeking to Stop the Abuse A.   “Since condominiums are not corporations (although the boards of manager…