NEW YORK CITY

It's becoming a tale of two sides of one city. On the one side, you have the working and middle class, struggling to make ends meet, vying for affordable housing, fighting to keep rezoning plans from driving them out of their homes. On the other, you have the mega rich, snapping up ultra-luxury condos in high-rise buildings such as Midtown's One57. And which side ends up getting the tax breaks, you ask? It looks like, in this case, it's good old One57, which just sold its penthouse for $100 million and got a $35 million tax break, "a subsidy offered to billionaire developers under 412-a tax abatement program," reports the Daily News. It also looks like hundreds of New Yorkers got mad as hell and protested the program last week in front of the high-end tower. According to the Daily News, "the protest comes amid a growing push to end the abatement program, which is set to expire this year unless it’s renewed by Albany pols." The Daily News, which featured One57 as a symbol of the city's growing divide between rich and poor in a separate news item, reported that "the feds are probing how One57 scored its tax break."

Chatham Green had a "horrible season." As manager Orlando Torres recalls it, the contractors had just started work replacing one of the 420-unit complex's three roofs when a major thunderstorm struck the Chinatown complex on July 25, 2014. "It was terrible," Torres says, "After we had exposed the area, it started raining, and it came through in some of our commercial tenants' space. But," he adds, everyone — from the board and management to the contractor and the insurance company — "handled it well, minimizing the damage."

Dealing with water woes is nothing new for the 63-year-old property. According to Torres, who works for the Gerard J. Picaso division of the Halstead Property Group, one of the commercial spaces had been dealing with recurring leaks for some time. "We had leaks for quite a while and they were patched here and there."

A READER ASKS: I live in a small co-op building with a roommate. The other night I noticed my next-door neighbor was making a lot of noise at close to midnight. I went to check and saw through the peephole that he and another guy were moving his sofa out. My roommate thinks I'm being nosy and paranoid but I think he might have bedbugs. Who gets rid of a sofa at midnight? I think I should let the board know, but my roommate says we should wait to see if we get any bedbugs first. This seems crazy to me. What should I do? 

In 2010, the board of the St. Tropez condominium at 340 East 64th Street in Manhattan held its annual meeting in an unfinished space. It may have saved on renting a hall, but it wasn't the best choice the board made that year. The condo was later sued by a resident who had tripped over an unseen hole in the paper-covered bumpy floor. "A lot of annual meetings are held in gyms," says attorney Adam Leitman Bailey, principal of his eponymous law firm. "Well, that gym is not there for an annual meeting."

Oops. Oh! OWW!

It is easy for a board to find itself embroiled in a slip-and-fall lawsuit, "among the most common" type of suit cooperatives and condominiums face, according to Bailey. And though you may have taken every precaution and been as prudent as a schoolmarm, you could still face a payout simply because it's cheaper than fighting a claim in court.

In my many years as an attorney, I have seen a number of frustrated boards that come back to the same problem year after year. Indeed, some construction jobs and building alterations seem to be done over and over again — costing the hapless residents time and money.

Is this just bad luck or something more that should be viewed as a warning sign of potential trouble?

Here are four examples of warning signs from my experience. 

After disaster strikes comes the difficult part: cleanup and restoration, not to mention the insurance claims. Restoration service companies are typically brought in by managing agents to handle the mopping up and repairs. These companies are paid by insurance. Either a claim is made on a building's policy or through the policy held by a unit-owner or shareholder. The amount of charges are determined by rates set by the insurance industry that cover everything from the number of air dryers used to the square footage of drywall that has to be ripped out, says Kathleen Hogarty, who works in commercial and residential sales for Servpro Scarsdale/Mount Vernon, a remediation service company.

After a fire, a flood, or other disaster in your building is contained, you can breathe a sigh of relief because the worst is over, right?

Wrong, according to the people who handle the cleanup afterward. That's when the hard part begins. For starters, boards and managing agents need to search for a restoration service company to handle the mopping up and repairs, and they need to navigate the quagmire of insurance claims. And when it comes to those insurance claims, there's a huge difference between insurance claims on a condo and a co-op. Jeffrey Gross, executive vice president of operations at Maxons Restorations, explains.

Ever wish you could live in the Waldorf Astoria? Well, your wish may come true, but you better prepare to have more than just a whole lot of money. The Real Deal (TRD) has learned that Anbang Insurance Group, which just paid almost $2 billion for the Waldorf, plans to convert the iconic hotel's two towers into condos. TRD obtained a transcript of a recent talk Anbang's chairman Wu Xiaohui gave at Harvard University. "We plan to renovate the two towers into luxury residential apartments with world-class amenities and finishes to reflect its culture and social status. A potential buyer needs to have more than money to qualify for our apartments," he said. How intriguing. What could it be? Celebrity? Clout? Lots of property? The Waldorf Towers operates as a 181-room boutique hotel within the Waldorf, and currently occupies the top floors of the 47-story building. It has a separate entrance on 50th Street, amenities include a fitness center, and it's just a hop, skip, and a taxi from Midtown's ultra-luxury billionaires' row. 

Photo by Christopher Bride for Property Shark

New condos are popping up all over the city. It's understandable when you consider all the perks of owning a condo. Condos tend to command higher prices on the market, but there is also the question of freedom. When you own a condo, it's yours. There's no board telling you what to do regarding sublets and no underlying mortgage. Seems pretty neat. So why don't co-ops look into converting? Well, for starters, it's not so simple. And it might not be worth the headache. 

While New York may have managed to dodge the big Snowmageddon bullet a few weeks ago, the city — particularly the boroughs other than Manhattan (and beyond) — has been hit with snow and high winds. And while seasoned New Yorkers might shrug it all off as a bit of snow, one problem that severe winter weather brings is the possibility of power outages.

Proactive co-op and condo boards can use this as an opportunity to distribute to their shareholders and unit-owners information on what steps to take if the power goes out.