It's not likely your co-op or condo neighbor is suffering from Ebola fever. Nope. Highly unlikely. Statistically almost impossible. And yet EMS workers who have to know about this kind of thing still got suited up in full hazmat attire when responding to two people in respiratory and cardiac distress at a Park Avenue condominium near East 61st Street on Thursday, writes the New York Daily News. And while neither was listed as "fever/travel patients," the FDNY's code for people suffering from Ebola-like symptoms, the paper said, there was no word as of this writing whether Ebola had been confirmed or ruled out. And what with Crain's New York Business reporting that the Harlem-based African Services Committee considers it essential to gain the cooperation of New York's West African community in order to contain Ebola's spread here, we'd certainly advise board members to read up on Ebola fact vs. myth.

The best step in a condo / co-op board can take to keep your building from becoming an illegal hotel — with absentee owners renting their apartments week-to-week or month-to-month via Airbnb and other short-term accommodation websites — is prevention, a topic Habitat covered earlier this month. But what do you do once you have a parade of non-vetted strangers living next to you and sharing hallways and elevators with your spouses and kids? You're not helpless. There are steps you can take.

Updated Oct. 10, 2014 — Another limited-equity Mitchell-Lama co-op has taken its first major step toward converting to market-rate. As DNAInfo.com reports, a two-thirds majority vote of shareholders at the more than 1,600-unit Southbridge Towers in the Financial District has voted for privatization — meaning a windfall for those who paid paid $10,000 or less for an apartment bought with the understanding that in exchange for that pittance the next hardworking New Yorker needing an affordable home would have one when the current resident left. It's not quite a done deal: Two-thirds of the shareholders still have to sign an "opt-in agreement" to stay as an owner, or else opt-out to become a renter.

Habitat recently covered the issue of ground-lease co-ops and condos from a big-picture, concept-and-instructional perspective. But the big picture ain't the only picture, and BrickUnderground.com does a nice job with this detailed, side-by-side comparison of two co-ops in Manhattan's Turtle Bay neighborhood: one a ground-lease (a.k.a. land-lease) co-op and the other not. So check out the $349,000 ground-lease one-bedroom at 420 East 51st Street, with a $3,238 monthly maintenance, and a comparable regular co-op at 400 East 52nd Street, asking $725,000 and with a $1,732 maintenance. Ah, but those numbers alone don't tell the story. The devil is in the details — as is, possibly, a devilishly good deal.

What does a cooperative need to prove when it sues a shareholder in landlord/tenant court for non-payment? These cases go to trial so rarely that people may not look at the proof the co-op must proffer.

But in 300 East 85th Housing Corp. v. Dropkin, the court considered the co-op's proofs and rendered a decision that is worth examining for several reasons.

Just when you think you've heard every claim a New York City shareholder can make against a co-op board, along comes a shareholder who makes an allegation so out of left field, it's not even from the Yankees' or the Mets' left field but from the left field of, I dunno, Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. 

The claim? That a co-op employee owed him a fiduciary duty to take his side in a dispute ... because they were sleeping together.

A 40-year fixture of Greenwich Village, the gay bar and lately drag mecca Boots & Saddle, is finding both neighborhood and condo-board opposition to a proposed move to a new home at 47 Seventh Avenue South. At a recent Community Board 2 meeting, reports DNAInfo.com, a half-dozen local residents said the bar would bring noise and disruption to what one called "our enclave." And representatives of the building's condo board said its bylaws prohibit a bar with live entertainment in the ground-floor space, a one-story extension of the building on a commercial strip of Seventh Avenue South. It previously housed the restaurant Soy and Sake (image below).

CB2's State Liquor Authority committee unanimously rejected the bar's application to transfer its liquor license to the new spot, and while the vote is only advisory, the Authority takes Community Board decisions seriously. One resident asked CB2, "What about the kids walking by?" To which one can only suggest, "First, what are little kids doing wandering around late at night? And second, what's wrong with kids seeing drag performers? This isn't the suburbs — it's New York City. Greenwich Village." Or at least it used to be.

No, "arborcide" doesn't refer to the port area of Cockney London. It's a term for tree-killing. And while there may be good reasons for removing a maple or executing an elm, a co-op or condo board reeeeeally needs to get community consensus on this — since if there's anything people love most next to their kids and pets, it's trees. There's a reason Shel Silverstein didn't write The Giving Shrub.

So, anyway, reports the blog Roosevelt Islander, the co-op board of Rivercross announced it was going to cut down four courtyard trees it said posted a safety danger and blocked the views of some apartments. The Roosevelt Island Tree Board — yes, that's a thing — rallied residents to a board meeting by pointing out possible ... shortcomings, let's say ... in the board's claims about the trees. And the board, to its credit, agreed to have what it said would be an impartial third arborist come in to render an opinion as to the trees' viability, and in a memo to shareholders thanked them "for their participation in the robust discussion." Which we think is just tree-mendous.

Bylaws can be tricky things. Most boards believe they can only be amended by, depending on the governing documents, a majority or a supermajority vote of the co-op shareholders or condo unit-owners. But depending on how your co-op propriety lease or condo articles of incorporation are written, boards may actually have the power to amend bylaws on their own, without a homeowner vote. The tricky part? Boards themselves can't remove amendments that homeowners approve — they can only remove amendments that a board approved.

Such was the tricky nature of bylaws in the case of a Manhattan cooperative trying to collect a sublet fee from a commercial tenant.

Co-op shareholder Thomas Campaniello owned the shares of a commercial unit at the cooperative at 136 Greene Street in Manhattan. In 2006, he signed a lease with the co-op board. Four years later, when he sought to sublease the space for $60,000 a month, the board refused to give consent unless he paid what his lawsuit called an "exorbitant sublet fee" of 10 percent of the monthly rent, based on a bylaw amendment that the board — not the residents — had adopted. Campaniello asserted he was forced to sign a written agreement consenting to pay the fee as well as $3,000 for the co-op board's legal costs, and was told if he didn't sign, he would have been denied permission to sublet.