MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

Can God and a luxury condo tower co-exist?
That’s the questions on the minds of administrators, students and alumni at the Gothic campus of Union Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, where The Wall Street Journal reports [paywall] that the school is considering selling 350,000 feet of air rights to a luxury condo developer to fund $100 million in renovations to building exteriors as well as electrical, mechanical and plumbing systems.
Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, the seminary’s president, said the proposed tower would be a “slender” building on the northern portion of the quadrangle at the center of the campus. The school is working with L&M Development Partners. Without specifying the building’s height, she said it would “respect” the 392-foot tower at nearby Riverside Church. Robert Von Ancken, an air rights expert, told the Journal he expected the building to be between 35 and 40 stories.
The idea of building luxury condos on the campus of a religious institution has met with stiff resistance. More than 200 students, alumni and others have signed a letter urging a “complete and immediate” scuttling of the plan. At a recent rally, one student carried a sign that declared “There are no luxury condos in the Kingdom of Heaven!”

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. A co-op board is rightly skeptical of a claim that no possible antidepression treatment even exists other than a dog. A starchitect's building in Brooklyn comes without a trash room, and the city says it's legal — but still tickets the condo for, well, not having a trash room. Manhattan condos are selling strong, but co-op bargains are to be had in the Heights. And for co-op / condo boards, a discrimination lawsuit still stands, but its lawyers don't.

The co-op board was complaining about the superintendent. "He sends us bills for everything he does," said the treasurer. "He paints the hallways, we get a bill. He repairs the burner, we get a bill. He fixes plumbing in the walls, we get a bill. What are we paying him for? Cleaning up the hallways and common areas?"

I listened carefully to the duties enumerated by my colleague on the board and thought, "That's an awful lot of work to do for the pittance we pay him."

Our bags were gone. 

My fiancé, Mike, and I had come home after having dinner at my parents' house. While he was parking, I took a few bags of groceries upstairs to our sixth-floor walk-up apartment and left a suitcase and another bag of groceries in the lobby for Mike to bring up when he came in.

But by the time he arrived — only a brief 10 minutes later — the bags had disappeared. After knocking on a few doors and finding that no one had seen or heard anything, we realized that our bags had been stolen — from our locked lobby!

Steven Schneider, an owner of the back-office company Back Office Inc., a.k.a. The Back Office, cautions that not every type of building benefits from "back-office only" (BOO) services. "It's the building that is having a lot of waterproofing issues," he says by way of example. "It's the building with the boiler they've had since year one and they've been putting band-aids on it, the building with a lot of problems and a board that needs its hand held every day."

As well, Schneider says, some potentially ideal candidates for BOO won't consider ditching their managing agents because it's seen as an issue of prestige to have an agent.