North Shore Towers Is New York's Biggest Smoke-Free Co-op

The North Shore Towers and Country Club, a sprawling co-op complex with 1,844 units in three residential towers on 110 acres in northeast Queens, has just become the city’s largest co-op to ban smoking inside residents’ apartments. It wasn’t easy, and it involved a bit of trial and error.

There is no shortage of theories on the best way to get a smoking ban passed, but Phyllis Goldstein, a North Shore Towers board member who spearheaded the effort to get shareholders to vote on the measure, said the board learned a valuable lesson after it failed to pass a smoking ban several years ago. The first ban failed, according to Goldstein, because the no-smoking measure was attached to the annual election. When an insufficient number of shareholders showed up for the annual meeting, the measure died.

“People wanted the ban,” Goldstein says, “but it made us realize that we needed a stand-alone election to pass a challenging measure.”

After receiving several complaints about second-hand smoke seeping into people’s homes, the co-op board informed shareholders in early April that it wanted to adopt a house rule prohibiting new residents from smoking inside their apartments, effective July 1. By April 21, the rule was approved.

Since the smoke problem was coming from existing residents, however, the board decided to go the extra step and amend the proprietary lease – which requires the approval of a two-thirds “super-majority” of shareholders. Recalling their first failure to pass a smoking ban – and taking into account that an unreturned ballot counted as a “No” vote – the board formed a task force to focus solely on getting out the vote.

An information blitz ensued. Goldstein wrote an article about the measure for the co-op newsletter. At an August 1 shareholders’ meeting, which was filmed and aired over the co-op’s in-house TV channel, Northwell Health and NYC Smoke-Free made presentations. The meeting also included a talk from a resident and engineer who explained the difficulty of blocking second-hand smoke from traveling between apartments.

“People need to hear from the experts, not just from their neighbors,” says Goldstein, adding that the meeting was “pivotal” in helping residents make up their minds.

“It was an exceptional meeting, standing room only,” recalls Phil Konigsberg, a community advocate at the Queens Tobacco Control Coalition, who helped support the ban. “Every question was answered.”

As voting was taking place during the months of August and September, the volunteers got to work. Each tower was split into two sections, with a section captain who kept tabs on volunteers in charge of certain floors. As the American Arbitration Association, a nonprofit group, collected the proxies, volunteers took note of which shareholders had voted. If a shareholder had not voted, a volunteer was dispatched to knock on the resident’s door with a blank proxy in hand. Reminder memos were pushed under doors. Phone calls were made as volunteers tracked down residents on vacation and, in many cases, the adult children of residents who had been given shareholder responsibility for their parents. Proxies were mailed out with a self-addressed stamped envelope.

In the end, 72 percent of shareholders voted to accept the measure – well more than the required “super-majority.” The measure was rejected by 15 percent of the shareholders, and 13 percent did not vote.

“It was an arduous task, but we had people who were gung-ho and believed in the smoking ban helping us day and night,” says Goldstein.

When the ball dropped on Times Square at midnight on January 1, smoking ceased inside all three buildings at North Shore Towers.