NEW YORK CITY

The outlook this year for your building's insurance costs? You'd better sit down: Michael Spain, president of the Spain Agency, predicts increases from 8 to 15 percent. "If a building has had a lot of claims in the last few years, it can be higher," he says. "If the building has had zero claims, it's going to be on the low side, but even with zero claims you're going to see some increase."

Spain recalls the case of one building where the premium went from $155,000 last year to $185,000 this year — a 19 percent hike. "That will certainly get their attention," he observes. But, by looking at the history of the building's payments, he can see that it got a great deal in the years from 2007 to 2011. "We think that if boards look at their historical costs, it may be more palatable," he says. It may be that it's going up now, but there were years where you saved some money."

Co-op shareholders and condo unit-owners sometimes have reason to get upset with their co-op board or condominium association. It might be about assessments, madcap spending, meanness or rudeness, unreasonable behavior, playing favorites, and directors doing things owners are not allowed to do, such breaking the rules. What  can a co-op / condo homeowner do? Or to put it another way, should a homeowner not do?

Co-ops and condos, which fall into the "Class 2" designation of the New York City tax code, were hit with a whopping a 13.353 percent tax rate for the first half of fiscal year 2011-2012 and a 13.513 percent for the second half.

What makes your taxes go up appreciably, of course, is not a boost in the tax rate, but rather your building's assessment. Eric Weiss, a tax certiorari attorney and a partner at Tuchman, Korngold, Weiss, Lippman & Gelles, says it is almost impossible to predict how much your building's assessment will rise. 

A monthly column by HABITAT's editorial director.

"Communication and cooperation always help avoid problems," attorney Stuart Saft, a partner at Holland & Knight, once said to me. Not everyone believes that.

I recently recalled an incident that occurred at my 22-unit cooperative some years ago. The sponsor held a long-term lease on a laundromat on the ground floor. It was a dirty and rundown space run by a jovial but rarely seen manager named Carlos. You saw more of his mother, a short, heavily wrinkled woman with squinty eyes and a screechy voice. She didn't speak, she SHOUTED, all in broken English, as she threw slabs of raw meat to a half-blind German shepherd that lay on the store's floor all day. In those pre-laundry card days, you'd need quarters, but she rarely had change. In addition, half of the machines seemed to be permanently out of order.

As a child in 1955, I moved into Hilltop Village Cooperative No. 3 — two seven-story buildings, with 100 units per building, in Hollis, Queens.

It's 57 years later, and I have now spent the last six years as board president. Hard to believe, yet true!

A reader writes: A shareholder in our co-op has moved out and now has a subtenant who went through all the proper co-op channels. Now this subtenant wants to bring in an unrelated roommate. Can the board require this new person to apply like the original subtenant, or is the original subtenant covered under the applicable New York City law?

New York State adopted the colloquially titled Roommate Law — formally, New York Real Property Law, Section 235f, "Unlawful Restrictions on Occupancy") in 1983 in part to deal with widespread controversies regarding subleasing. Early on, the courts decided that the Roommate Law applies to co-ops, which operate under a proprietary lease.

Condo and co-op management is about more than property: It is also about people.

Lawyer and author Adam Leitman Bailey, the principal at his eponymous firm, believes that buildings should have physicals — especially newly constructed condominiums. Otherwise, people buying into such a building and those new condo boards running it may not know how healthy or unhealthy the condo is. He has handled hundreds of such cases.

"If your equipment is really old, replacing your cables and other mechanical stuff can costs $20,000 to $30,000," observes explains Ken Breglio, president of the maintenance firm BP Elevator, "and yet the elevator will run the same, because fixing safety issues doesn't enhance the ride. Why? Because the controls are old."

And co-op / condo boards and residents don't always get that. Compounding that communication issue is the fact that the city's revised elevator regulations don't have grandfather provision for existing elevators — elevators that complied perfectly well with the law at the time they were installed.

These mandated upgrades are technically repair or maintenance issues, notes Gerard J. Picaso, president of Gerard J.Picaso Inc., a management firm. That means, for instance, that when an inspector says some newly mandated component has to be installed in what's been a perfectly safe, working elevator, the building's elevator-company contract doesn't cover that improvement.

In 1964, Governor Nelson Rockefeller enacted the New York State's Condominium Act, and the rest of the U.S. followed. But since then, the other states and even Puerto Rico have modernized their laws. Twenty-five states even use the Uniform Condominium Act and others the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act, while New York has remained loyal to a law that is inadequate.