LEGAL/FINANCIAL

A resident in an Upper East Side condo recently asked: Is our building open to prosecution for allowing a 16-year-old doorman to work a double shift on a Sunday during the school year?

The answer is yes, says the Ask Real Estate column in The New York Times, since city law does not allow anyone to quit school until 17 years old and state laws generally forbid anyone under 17 from working more than one 8-hour shift in a day.

“(Does the board) have a responsibility to this child to enforce the rules?” Walter K. Harman Jr., a Manhattan labor lawyer, said of the teenage doorman. “Morally, I say yes. Absolutely.”

In violating child labor laws, a co-op or condo board could leave itself open to getting sued, fined, or investigated by the State Department of Labor. Shareholders or unit owners could wind up having to cover legal fees and fines, leading to an assessment or an increase in monthly maintenance or common charges.

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It’s every co-op and condo board’s worst nightmare: your property manager is a crook. Could anything make it worse? How about a technicality on your insurance policy that allows the insurance company to deny your claim? Believe it or not, if you don’t read the fine print or you get the wrong type of crime insurance, it could happen to you.

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High-end Manhattan condo developer DDG is making its first foray across the East River to Brooklyn to undertake its first conversion project. Working with Westbrook Partners, DDG plans to convert the former Standish Arms Hotel in Brooklyn Heights into a luxury condominium.

Westbrook and DDG purchased the elegant 12-story, 120-unit building from Taurus Investment Holdings last summer for $60 million, Crain’s reports. Taurus had converted the Standish, located at 169 Columbia Heights, from a hotel to luxury rental apartments in 2008.

The condo conversion will be DDG’s eighth development in the city. The company is known for luxury residential buildings that feature handmade bricks from Denmark as a design signature.

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If living way up in the sky is your idea of heaven, we’ve got good news for you. The Italy-based Pizzarotti Group has confirmed to Curbed that it plans to wedge an 86-story condo tower into the shoulder-to-shoulder Financial District in lower Manhattan.

The building, at 45 Broad Street, was designed by CetraRuddy and will be 1,100 feet tall, which easily qualifies it for admission into the city’s growing club of so-called “supertalls.” (A height of at least 984 feet is required for admission.) The tower will have 245 condo apartments that will cater to “entry- and mid-level buyers,” says Pizzarotti CEO Rance MacFarland. In addition to a pool, gym and lounge, there will be five floors of commercial space. Plans call for ground to be broken late this year, with a completion date in 2018.

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When people slip on ice and snow, co-op and condo boards face potential liability. They can avoid such woes by hiring an outside contractor to remove ice and snow from the property – and take on liability for any mishaps. So it makes sense to hire the work out, right? Not necessarily.

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During January, Habitat Weekly will advise boards on how to deal with a quartet of natural-born killers. This week: asbestos.

It's a busy time in your co-op. The couple in apartment 4B is knocking out a wall to open up their kitchen. Meanwhile, crews are replacing the floor tiles in all of your prewar building's hallways. And finally, your boiler is being removed. Warning bell time: your co-op or condo board should be prepared for the possibility that such demolition and renovation projects could unleash lethal asbestos, both inside apartments and in common areas. Failure to do so can lead to any number of unhappy endings, including sickness, lawsuits, even death.

If ever there was a time to be prepared, this is it.

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The city has filed a lawsuit against a glossy Tribeca condo tower, claiming its shoddy construction is causing sinkholes in a public school playground and adjacent dog run.

The builders and owners of 200 Chambers Street are at fault for sinkholes caused by “defective pile driving and sheet piling” during construction of the building, according to the suit filed in Manhattan Civil Court, as reported by DNAinfo. 

The city sold the property behind P.S. 234 to developer Jack Resnick & Sons in 2005. Sinkholes began appearing during construction, from 2005 to 2007. Repairs were made, but the problem recurred after Hurricane Sandy hit. The city says in its suit that it has made “repeated demands on the condo and the board” to fix the problem, without success. As for damages, the city is asking for “an amount to be determined at trial.”

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Two seemingly similar buildings flank 123rd Street on Madison Avenue in upper Manhattan. They were both built in the late 1990s, and they both started life as affordable co-op housing under the umbrella of the city’s Housing Development Corporation (HDC) and department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). They even have similar names: Maple Plaza and Maple Court.

But these two co-ops have taken sharply different paths. Maple Court recently refinanced its HDC mortgage and continues to live by the restrictions and protections that come with it.

Across 123rd Street, Maple Plaza decided to break away from its affordable-housing origins and pursue life as a conventional co-op. Here’s why.

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While building owners in New York City – including many co-ops and condos – get more than $1 billion in annual tax breaks under the 421-a program, hundreds of workers in those buildings are being illegally underpaid, according to a new investigation by ProPublica.

A 2007 state law said that no tax benefits would be granted to 421-a buildings that fail to pay “prevailing” wages to their non-union employees – a rate set by the city comptroller and pegged to union contracts. The law covers buildings of 50 or more units that started construction after December 2007.

Since then, according to city estimates, up to 400 buildings have fallen under the requirement to pay “prevailing” wages, but in 2013 the 32BJ labor union found that nearly half of the buildings it surveyed had underpaid employees. Last summer the state legislature transferred oversight of the wage requirement from the city’s department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to the city comptroller.

One victim of the lax oversight is Francis Alphonse, the super at 341 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. By law he should be paid $24.83 an hour plus $10.38 in benefits; in reality he’s paid $15.63 an hour with no benefits.

“When you know the government is giving out these big tax breaks and they do nothing for workers,” Alphonse said, “it’s like you want to cry.”

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Philip Eng still remembers when the lights went out.

It was a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2005. Eng had been living at the 318-unit Regent’s Park Gardens condominium in Queens for just three months, and at first he thought there had been a short circuit in his building. But then he found that the power was off in the development’s 13 other buildings as well. It stayed off for half a day.

Eventually Eng found out why: the condo’s Con Ed bills had not been paid for months. Further investigation revealed that the condo was basically broke.

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