NEW YORK CITY

A cursory look around the city is all that's necessary to notice just how much construction is happening everywhere. It feels like there's scaffolding on every other block, as old buildings get reduced to rubble so new buildings can rise up. Commuters racing past almost get used to it, tuning out the noise. But it's not so easy for anyone who lives in a building that abuts another that's about to be demolished.

We're not just talking about the inconvenience of the noise, the dust, the shaking, and everything else that is par for the course in a massive construction project. Older buildings, especially, with potentially weaker walls are especially vulnerable to damage from adjacent construction work. It's true that the responsibility for protecting surrounding properties rests with the developer or owner of the new project. However, your board can still take precautionary steps to protect the building should anything go wrong.

It may be called 426 West Broadway House Condominium, but it actually isn't a house at all. It's a six-story, 36-unit loft building that runs the length of an entire block from West Broadway to Thompson Street. Built in 1900 as a commercial space, it was gut-renovated and transformed into large condominium apartments in the early eighties.

It's been transformed again — this time out of necessity. And what a bumpy journey it has been.

After a series of serious leaks, the seven-member board — including a fairly typical mixture of SoHo types, from investment bankers and artists to a real estate developer and a writer — decided to replace the roof. This seemingly simple task became more complex than it had first appeared. "It's a very large roof — 18,000 square feet," observes Ellen Kornfeld, Vice President at the Lovett Group, who has managed the property since 1989. She says that the board had to deal with a number of issues.

It was 81 sponsor units — bought and financed — that ended up causing the near-downfall of a co-op in Queens. A series of missteps and significant risks taken by the co-op's live-in building manager, Robert Valdes-Clausell, got the building in hot water and then some: it fell behind on bills, defaulted on a sizable loan, and spiraled into foreclosure. In an effort to put the breaks on the foreclosure, Clausell and the board took an action that sealed the co-op's fate: they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 

A READER ASKS: I recently moved into a midsize co-op in Brooklyn. I've noticed that one of my neighbors keeps leaving her baby carriage and shopping cart in the basement. I had to leave my bike in the basement for a few hours on a Saturday, in the same spot where she typically leaves her things. I figured it would be okay, since I don't make it a habit. But I got an e-mail from the board letting me know that I was not to use common areas in the building, basement included, as storage space. I know it seems petty of me to point out that the only reason I thought it would be okay to leave my bike there is because my neighbor constantly uses it for her things, but I'm very annoyed. It's a fairly big basement and it's kind of astounding that we don't have storage space as it is. Should I say something? Should I complain about my neighbor? Or should I keep it more positive and request they create official storage space? 

The owner of a sponsor unit in a non-eviction co-op in The Bronx wants to move in now that the original tenant, who was protected under rent-stabilization laws, has died. But there's a complication. The original tenant's son moved into the apartment about 18 months before she died, and has now claimed succession rights. Can the sponsor unit owner evict him under the owner occupancy law? That's one of the questions Ronda Kaysen fields in this week's "Ask Real Estate" column in The New York Times. "Noneviction co-ops were designed to protect rental tenants from eviction if they did not buy their apartments when the building converted to a co-op. If the son successfully claimed succession rights, he is entitled to all the rights the lease provides — including the right to not be evicted, even if the owner wants to occupy the unit," explains Kaysen. That means the original tenant's son can stay, as long as he follows the terms of the lease and rent stabilization law. But it also may come down to timing. To claim legitimate succession rights, the son would have had to have moved in two years "before the time the rent-stabilized tenant vacated the apartment." In this case, the son is a few months short, unless his mother was disabled or elderly — in which case he would only have to have lived in the apartment for one year.

Nearly a year ago, we reported that one of Mayor Bill de Blasio's goals was to see a more economically diverse New York City by building 80,000 new units of affordable housing. It's not been the smoothest of journeys, and it may get even bumpier soon. The problem? Overcrowding. Yeah, no kidding, you may say, and rightfully so, but it's even worse than we thought. According to new census estimates, the population of New York City soared to 8,491,079 — that's just 60,000 people short of the projected population in 2020. In fact, reports New York YIMBY, we will have reached the 2020 estimate by 2016. Whoops! Guess we underestimated just how many people love moving to the Big Apple. Of course, that means there's that many more people putting a strain on the city's aging infrastructure, the already competitive job market — and don't get us started on the housing crisis. If the population keeps growing at this rate, we're really gonna need those 80,000 new units and then some, and quickly before the endangered species that is the native New Yorker becomes extinct.

It's no news that New York is changing and fast. Luxury condos, soaring rents, New Yorkers getting priced out of their longtime homes, longtime businesses getting priced out gentrified neighborhoods… In recent weeks, we've read about the 85-year-old grandmother getting evicted from her home in Little Italy (where she's lived since the 1960s) by her landlord, the Italian American Museum — a painful reminder that Little Italy continues shrinking, and there's not much of it left. We've also read about how photographer Jay Maisel, who purchased the Germania Bank building, a gorgeous graffiti-covered Bowery holdout, finally caved after 40 years and sold it for a sizable profit. Hell's Kitchen is another neighborhood that is changing fast. After more than a century in business on West 44th Street, in its original 1912 building, Dykes Lumber Yard has packed up and relocated. Citing city documents, DNAinfo reported that the family who owned the property, and the lumberyard, sold the building to condo developer Charles Friedman for just under 11 million dollars in June. The lumberyard is moving to 124 E. 124th St. Dykes President Charles Kreyer told DNAinfo that "Hell's Kitchen had become inhospitable to the business' industrial needs. 'The city was coming around and making everything difficult,' he said. 'People can't make deliveries, you can't load up a truck.'"

Spring has sprung! Finally. Well, sort of. Now that the nicer, sunnier weather looks like it's going to stick around, co-op and condo boards should get ready for the green thumbs who live in their buildings. While simple flower plantings in common areas can certainly increase a building's curb appeal and foster some community spirit among residents, they must be vetted by the board first. A poorly planned gardening project can cost your co-op or condo a lot of money to remedy.

We already know that February condo sales hit a historic low, but how did co-op sales fare? CityRealty, which provides end-to-end service for prospective apartment buyers and in-depth analysis of the New York real estate market, has crunched the numbers in its April 2015 monthly market report. Let's take a look at some of the highlights. 

For many, it was like living in a nightmare.

Between 1989 and 1995, dozens of co-ops and condos faced severe financial difficulties because sponsors — who frequently still had a stake in the buildings they had converted — were defaulting. To get their buildings out from under onerous rent controls, sponsors had converted and borrowed heavily against them. But then they could not keep up with maintenance or common charges on these unsold apartments. The reason? Money from their rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants was far less than their income.