A week dedicated to the stories from New York’s uniquely ubiquitous housing option.
Co-op board members had no shortage of war stories to share with us.
Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Getty
There’s something almost feudal about the co-op board. Sure, the members are elected, and sure, they oversee some of the more mundane details of building maintenance and fiscal health that few people actually want to spend their free time dealing with. But they also decide who gets to live where in one of the most expensive and competitive real-estate markets in the country — and how. They get to say yes or no to the additional bathroom you’ve been plotting since before you even moved in. They know which new shareholders are just living off their family trusts; why the start-up founder didn’t even get an interview; which of their fellow board members are abusing their perch to hog an extra parking space. The minutes kept at any given board meeting, terse notes about leaks and litter in the hallway, hardly tell the full story of how things get done. How many times now have lawmakers tried to pass some form of co-op transparency legislation, only to watch their bills die? Looking for the complete picture of what actually goes on during board meetings can feel like trying to peer inside a black box.
So of course we’re curious about the rooms where these things happen. In exchange for anonymity, we asked current and former co-op board members to tell us what they’re really saying when they’re reading over your application. Are the horror stories about getting rejected for an apartment because a board member had been eyeing it for themselves true? (Well, yes — at least according to some of the people we talked to.) Then there are the fistfights, affairs, rogue celebrity renovations, and so, so much else. “Living in a New York City co-op is the worst possible way to live in New York City,” one former board member tells me, “except for all the others.” Let’s get into it.
Manhattan, on the board more than five years
I remember I was at my partner’s house, and their mom was there, and I was on the phone screaming at someone on the board. My partner’s mom was like, “What was wrong with her?” That’s how we all did business. It was personal. Maybe we had some mental illness? We just hated each other. We didn’t have a lot to do, so we had all the time in the world to fight and hate each other. If I was on a board like that now, I’d resign or sue.
But we do have work to do. Rejecting people? There’s so much legal liability in rejecting someone. But we did reject this rental application. It was totally justified. The owner called us and begged us to interview this person, and we were like, “They’re a total asshole. Are you sure?” We interviewed them; they were a total asshole in the interview. They were really paranoid — like, “If I give you my finances, you’ll know all this information about me.” We could not care less. We have standard financial requirements, and this person didn’t want to submit the paperwork properly. They were probably a huge conspiracy theorist. My advice for anyone applying today? Just play ball. Most normal boards are going to look at your financials and they’ll let you in if you’re qualified. If you apply to a building and the board turns you down because they’re assholes, lucky you that you don’t have to live there.
We did have to kick one person out of the building, though. He was belligerent and a total disaster, and he harassed a board member. He was living in a family member’s apartment, so technically, he wasn’t an owner, but he was a total loser and would hang out in the lobby. He petitioned and asked us if he could come back to the building, saying, “I’ve learned my lesson.” We had to get the attorney involved, and he hasn’t been back since.
New York City, on the board for over four years
You’re often in the middle of stuff going on between residents. There’s a rule in the bylaws that you can’t put anything on the doors. But mezuzahs have been tolerated forever, and at Christmas time, wreaths are tolerated, okay? Anyway, this lovely couple of Indian heritage moved in, and there is a tradition to paint the Hindu swastika, which represents peace, on the front door of a new home, which they did. It looks like a Nazi swastika at a slightly different angle, and you can pretty much guess the reaction. So I had to talk to them about taking it down. And they asked, “Why are mezuzahs allowed and Christmas wreaths allowed?” And they had a fine point! We went back to the shareholders and did our best to communicate that this was not a Nazi swastika, and gave everyone a little lesson in Hindu religious traditions and culture. That didn’t go over well, either. Eventually, we reached an understanding with the couple: They took it down and we agreed to repaint the door for them. Ultimately, the board never had to vote on whether or not to force them to take it down, which I was delighted about. It meant … I don’t know … we didn’t have to litigate it, either.
Mostly, there are peaceful resolutions — though long before I was on the board, they did have a fist fight between board members: Two senior citizens duked it out. It was 10 or 15 years ago, I think, but one guy was beaten up. I saw a black eye.
East Village, on the board for three years
I had probably already been in the building five years, and there was this feeling that the board is mafiaesque. So I was sitting in the annual shareholder meeting, sitting next to two cute girls — Albert Hammond Jr.’s girlfriend, and she had brought a friend — and people are saying, “We need people to be on the board,” and the girls are like, “You should do it.” I’m like, “Fuck it, okay.”
I did get in, and then I was part of an internal coup. There was an old lady that nobody liked at all, and she had been the president forever. She hated every idea — every answer was no without hearing the reasoning behind it — and she just made everybody’s life miserable. There was a freight elevator next to the normal elevator, and sometimes, when things were busy, the porters would let people come in and use it, but they had to bring you up and down. She just treated it as her private elevator, and she treated the building staff like they were her personal employees. She was the Grinch that everybody hated, and the goal was to get her out. It meant talking to shareholders in the hallways or the short elevator rides where they were trying to bitch about three things at once and saying to them, “Can we please get some more people willing to step up to the plate for this thankless job and see more options so people don’t just go, ‘Hey, the president is on the ballot again; let’s vote for her again’?” Ultimately, it took a year or so to get the president out, and I think she moved out a year or two later. The porters were psyched.
We talked about building a roof deck for every year that I was in the building, and there were so many people opposed to it. You start hearing the reasoning and you’re like, Oh my God, people are crazy. They were saying, “People will be going up there at all hours; it’ll be noisy.” One thing that I have to acknowledge is that I moved there in the late ’90s and people that were there in the early ’90s tell stories about entire floors being run by drug dealers and walls painted black, so there are people with a memory of a time when it was different — not the sort of gentrifiers, if you will, who are like, “This is a chill apartment building; one-bedrooms cost $700,000.”
There was some rock-star rogue renovation there. Albert Hammond Jr. maybe had only lived in the building for, like, a year and a half, but there were multiple issues where we were like, “Somebody has to tell him he can’t do this.” He was definitely doing work throughout where it was like, “You need to file this document. You have to put up this security deposit. You have to make sure that you have insurance for these things.” He just wasn’t ever doing any of that. It was always one of his people — a manager, his girlfriend — with whom we were trying to resolve a building issue. We’d tell them, “You can’t do that,” and they’re like, “Well, I don’t know; he’s on tour and we don’t know where he is,” but the renovation has started.
Apathy and frustration is how I’d describe being on the board. All the other shareholders think you’re totally mismanaging, and it’s just a disorganized group of five people who are volunteering to run a huge building with a multimillion-dollar budget. The plumbing was a huge issue. After each shareholder meeting, we would try to deal with it for three or four months and get to an impasse, and then let it go until the next shareholder meeting, when everybody would yell about it. It was on the docket from the first shareholder meeting that I went to, and it was still on the docket ten years later, when I moved out. And it was just such a monumental job that we didn’t have the resources, knowledge, and support to move it forward. And so then, we have everybody yelling at the shareholder meeting, and man, it ground itself to a halt each time.
Windsor Terrace area, on the board for five years
I was in a smallish building, so there’s just a general sense that everybody’s got to pitch in at some point and join the board. I really didn’t want to do it. I’m a person who has a lot of anxiety and an aversion to conflict.
It’s challenging — your biggest financial assets are entangled with all of these other people. You’ve got people in really different life circumstances in the building, some who have been there for a long time and then some who have come in on this more recent wave of gentrification. In every case we had a new applicant, just given the prices of these places, they were always pretty well-heeled people. We never rejected any sale. We pretty much rubber-stamped the people that individual shareholders were looking to sell to.
But then you’ve got people in $30,000- or $40,000-a-year households and people who are probably $300,000- or $400,000-a-year households. Say you need a new roof: Do you rip off the whole roof and really extensively fix it for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Or do you put some new covering on it for $30,000 or something? It’s just a really tricky balancing act. There’s the proper way — the best way — to do something, which you should do, and then there’s many, many different choices that are half-measures or quarter-measures, and balancing how hard do you want to be on the people that have a harder time paying versus how much do you want to do the best thing for the building as a whole.
There was a time when we were having bike thefts, and I thought, “Should we sleep in the basement with a sleeping bag where the thief has been getting in to steal bikes?” I never actually did that, but the board was weighing whether we should install a big security system or just get the buzzer thing fixed and hope the thefts stop. We did not get a camera system. We just upgraded our locks and tried to stay vigilant, and the thefts did stop.
Once I was up all night, trying to figure out what we should do about some big assessment thing — I think trying to pay off an old building mortgage. I was on vacation with my family, at some airport hotel. My son was 4 years old, and at one point late in the night, he was still awake because I was pacing around, and so I took him outside the hotel and we walked around in the middle of the night. He still talks about it to this day, like “that night that we stayed up all night walking around jumping on fire hydrants and stuff.” He thinks it was a fun time. Really, I just couldn’t sleep because I was stressed.
My hair has receded and gone gray. I did a lot of my graying during those years. It’s a chapter in my life that’s behind me that I am very, very happy that it is.
Manhattan, on the board for 14 years
I ran because people asked me to run; they needed a coalition, and I know how to get along with people. We had lawyers on the board. We had schoolteachers on the board, we had housewives and househusbands. We had semi-brain-dead people — this one guy, we assigned him to decide what food we were going to order at lunch and dinner meetings.
Depending who the person was and whether people liked him or not, any board member who wanted a bigger apartment, who wanted to get a choice unit and join their apartments together, they got the apartment. Some joined two apartments together, and some people joined three apartments together. If I know, for example, that a non-board member is going for a particular apartment, but I happen to know that the apartment in question would help me make my apartment bigger, you might get rejected for that apartment. There is a woman who joined the board two years after I did in 1995; she has seven apartments all joined together. She’s one of the few people that did what no one else can do — she actually took hallway space too. She got the board to approve that. Like, right out of the elevator is her door. I think there’s only one other tenant in the entire co-op that has that. She’s still on the board today.
Why do some people get rejected? There were things sometimes that cut on racial lines, but those weren’t spoken. It’s like, you look at an application, you look at the name, then you look at where they’re from, and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want that here.” You didn’t have to give a reason; you just rejected people outright, and you don’t say anything that goes into the minutes. Like, the lower floors of the buildings, we wanted those for Orthodox families, who’d have to walk up and down the stairs during Shabbat. If a non-Jewish family or non-Orthodox family wanted to move to the third floor, that might not be approved if we knew that there were other people buying the apartment that would be a better fit for using the stairs. On the other hand, if you had an Orthodox Jewish family that wanted to get a 20th-floor apartment with a deluxe balcony, we’d say, “Hey, let’s keep them on the low floors where they belong, and let’s give the better apartments to the better people.” It went both ways. I don’t remember anyone being rejected for any real good reason.
We gossiped a lot. We talked about people having affairs; we would talk about the shareholders that we knew were doing things they shouldn’t be doing and things like that. I was the secretary of the board for a while, and we used to go through the minutes and edit them out because we didn’t want certain things to be public. I don’t think that’s allowed.
Shareholder meetings were one of the most raucous, uncontrolled things in the world. We had local rabble-rousers. Every week, there’d be a piece of paper under every apartment door from a shareholder, his own newsletter — I think it was called the Eric Gazette. He would call out board members and write about what their personal issues are, their family issues, and how they were managing or destroying your home. And then people would come to shareholder meetings with the Eric Gazette in their hand, like, “Is this true?” No, it’s not true, you know, but I can’t prove a negative.
My opinion on boards is that I think that they’re silly. The average person who lives in a co-op, whether you’re an accountant, a financier, a lawyer, or a plumber, what gives you the knowledge to be on the board? There are certain decisions that have to be made that are necessary, that are fiduciary, and not everybody’s capable of doing that. But when you’re running for the board, it’s a popularity contest. It’s who you know, who hangs out in the courtyard and courts the most votes and friends, not necessarily who’s more capable of running the co-op. So you end up with a bunch of clowns on the board who couldn’t get hired to be a dogcatcher, but they’re deciding the fate of people who own million-dollar apartments.
Northwest Brooklyn, on the board for two years
The building is self-managed, but it’s more than 25 units — really too big of a building for a bunch of part-time volunteers to be dealing with. There’s also a generational divide. The president on the board is this old woman who was one of the original shareholders when the building was converted back in the early ’80s. Her husband was the board president, and she took over from him. And there were these two other older women, also original shareholders from the ’80s who had previously been on the board, stepped down, and are back on the board now. They’re just grumpy. Their attitude is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Also: “We’re not a luxury building.” The older generation of shareholders who have been there for decades, they sort of see it as a middle-class building. But the reality is anyone who’s buying into this building now, they have $2 million at minimum to buy one of the units. So it’s an upscale clientele.
I remember one time when plans for renovation were being discussed, because the interior spaces are a problem. You have real-estate agents who show units, and the first thing they do is they apologize, “Oh, this is all going to be updated; don’t worry.” This woman on the board was like, ‘This is ridiculous. We just need to get our super some paint, and he can paint the walls.’ And it’s like, “No, we’re not just slapping up paint on the wall!”
I did a big renovation project in our unit, and that was difficult. This one member of the board who oversees renovation projects, he just was difficult. At one point, he was convinced our contractors were drilling into a slab in our bathroom he didn’t want them drilling into, so he was looking through our windows and filming. It was a tense situation for a while.
All the people on the board are pretty conservative — they aren’t really pushing hard to have updates. The two people who were pushing hard were me and this other guy, and we both got voted off.
Park Slope–Gowanus area, on the board for seven years
We’re in a small building, relatively speaking — there’s only 10 units. I probably joined the board maybe seven years ago, partly because there was a member of the board who was a little bit bonkers. He was threatening to sue the board, calling emergency services on the building, and he left for Westchester County, where he belonged.
It becomes super apparent in co-op buildings which people actually are built for New York City and who is not. I think you can kind of get away with things when you’re in a rental building and be like, “Oh, yeah, I love New York City,” but when you buy something and then you have to collectively deal with owning property in New York City and actually get along with your neighbors, I think that separates a lot of people very quickly. But even saying something like, “Co-ops separate New Yorkers who are New Yorkers from people who belong in a cul-de-sac” — the reality is, with the people who leave, it’s because they’ve lost their fucking mind. You finally own your own apartment in New York City, it’s a decent investment financially, you made it this far, so obviously — so if you suddenly change your mind, that just means something dramatic has happened.
We haven’t had any rejections. The process to buy an apartment kind of spits out this uniformly bland neighbor. You’re not going to get that person from more than 20 years ago who bought the apartment for something like $30,000; that might be a far more interesting neighbor, and I mean that in a good way. What we get is somebody with a high credit score and super employable in one of the most competitive job markets in the country. They’re not going to be a hoarder. They might be an asshole, but that you can hide. We do get people who outright lie, who say, “Oh, I love participating in community.” That’s just not statistically possible in New York City — 50 percent of the people who say that are just outright lying. That just means you have to pull their garbage for them.
Riverdale, on the board for five years
We had seven board members, and on it, there was a coterie of board members who were all women, and they all voted in a bloc. They ran it like a high school clique — the Mean Girls. They would cut people off when they were talking, they would not listen to ideas from certain people, they’d be very dismissive. For me, it became, like, “Oh man, I dealt with these girls in high school; I don’t need to deal with them in my middle age.”
The Mean Girls had five of them on the board at one point, and the building did okay because there were some committees that were effective for a while, but then it went downhill. We’re a nice building, in my estimation, but the Mean Girls had pretensions to it being a luxury building. One of the clique’s members was in charge of the admissions committee, and we used to have a policy that if the bank approved you and you were gainfully employed, you could live in the building, even if you had a lower down payment. The Mean Girls started making rules that you had to have these big down payments, which ended up getting implemented after I left the board. But before then, they were soft-pedaling to buyers: “We’re not sure you should live in this building if that’s all you can afford to put down.” I made the argument that you’re excluding people who just became attending physicians at Montefiore and didn’t have family money, and they said, “Well, you know, we’re a luxury building; we shouldn’t take such low down payments.” I said, “I think you don’t remember where you came from.”
The problems weren’t about board members giving family members contracts, but in the selfish aspect. There was a period of time where you were allowed to enclose your terrace and form a sunroom, which is very nice. But we’re a 17-story building, and the cantilever terraces can’t take all that weight. So we said, “If you don’t have an enclosure already, you can’t put one up now because of the weight” — except that the Mean Girls got to put them up.
Our utilities are part of the maintenance, and basically, the number of shares you have determines what share you pay, and there were a few people who had washers and dryers in their apartments, which they weren’t supposed to have, but we grandfathered that in. But then four of the five Mean Girls put washers and dryers in their apartment. Somehow, they were allowed to.
We had an architect on the board who was very well-meaning who just got fed up with the board process and left. These are people who genuinely want to protect their investment and do what’s right for the building, and those people get driven out. That’s what’s so toxic about the board process: that over time, you get the lowest common denominator.
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