2005 Oct
Focus on... Board Operations

All she wanted to do was to sell her co-op apartment. Although she used her ground-floor property both for work and as a residence, she wasn’t quite sure whether it could be sold as a live-work apartment. So she did what she thought sh…

With upkeep and mortgage payments, even the occasional renovation, owning your own co-op or condo can be work enough on its own. Now imagine being responsible for 10 units, or 50, even 200. That daunting task is up to each building’s boa…

Is there anybody in this world who likes sitting through meetings? Too often they seem pointless, endless and directionless. But they’re part of co-op and condo life, an important part in fact, so if you’re a board member or property man…

Every co-op shareholder knows that their board president is responsible for making decisions that affect the entire building community—but not as many grasp the amount of responsibility and decision-making that a person undertakes when t…

Boards of directors are usually made up of ordinary people, elected or appointed by their neighbors to run their building smoothly and efficiently. Most board members do their utmost to fulfill that expectation, but occasionally, even th…

After what seemed like years, the wrangling over the proposed West Side Stadium in Manhattan and the city’s bid for the 2012 Olympics is over. A new stadium will now be built in Queens, not Manhattan; New York wasn’t chosen for the Olymp…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…