NEW YORK CITY

Lawsuit seeks $2.5 million from David Geffen over gut reno.

“It’s just too political.”

New rules would treat co-ops and condos alike.

There are many reasons why New York real estate taxes are out of whack. One of the biggest is the caps on annual increases, which let rapidly appreciating homes escape taxes while less valuable homes pay.

Once again, the rich get richer.

Lawsuits over adulterated heating oil get a new life.

Self-protection and self-expression can co-exist on your building’s social media platforms. Here’s how.

The frenzy to come up with a name that lends a certain je ne sais quoi – and, just maybe, enhanced value – to New York City apartment buildings has been known to go to comical lengths.

People exhibit inexhaustible imaginative powers when it comes to coining a name that will drape a building with the perfect aura. There are buildings that yearn to sound like money (Trump Tower, The Sterling). There are buildings named for socks (Argyle House), for country clubs (The Pinehurst, Congressional), for English authors (Byron, Boswell, Carlyle), and for schools (Amherst, Barnard, Cambridge). There are buildings that sound like places fox hunters might live (Hardenbrook House, Hadley Arms). And buildings that conjure airy and vaguely European dreamscapes (Azure, Cielo, Beau Rivage).

Until now, to the best of our knowledge, no building in the city had ever been named after an international terrorist organization. But that became the unfortunate fate of Isis, a 19-story condo at 303 E. 77th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was completed in 2010 and named after the Egyptian goddess of fertility.

But with the recent rise of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), the condo’s board of managers realized they had a branding problem. And so, according to a former board member who was not involved in the vote, the Isis board recently voted to scrap the Egyptian goddess name with the terrorist associations and instead go with the less evocative but far safer 303 E. 77th Street.

It could have been worse. The Isis could have been known as the Bin Laden.

Attorney Jim Glatthaar, a partner at Bleakley Platt & Schmidt, remembers it well. “The sponsor was away on vacation and had forgotten to vote and we needed his shares for a quorum,” Glatthaar says. The solution? An electronic proxy. The sponsor completed it and gave the lawyer a “directed” proxy – specifying how the proxy was to be used. Glaathaar could not vote the sponsor’s shares; he could use them only to achieve a quorum.

Electronic proxies can save you.

Three years ago, the New York state legislature shook up the world of co-ops and condos by changing the way tax abatements get parceled out. Starting in the 2012-2013 tax year, only primary residents of co-op and condo apartments were eligible. The change complicated bookkeeping for co-ops in a number of ways, and it was only in the last few months that things had settled down enough so that one managing agent could say, “The situation has more or less returned to normal.”

Guess again.

Since the New York State Legislature codified the current property tax system into four classifications in 1981 – Class 1 including one- to three-family homes; Class 2 for
co-ops, condos, and rental buildings; Class 3 for utilities; and Class 4 for commercial properties – the system, inequitable from the start, has grown into a patchwork of rates, assessments, caps, and phase-ins so complex and politically fraught that each time a proposal has been made for reform, the howls of protest have pushed it back.

There is no touching the system without creating, in relative terms at least, winners and losers.