MANHATTAN

For such a relatively rare real-estate instrument, ground leases have been in the news a fair bit lately. And now the shareholders of Trump Plaza, at 167 East 61st Street in Manhattan, are getting news they might prefer to live without. As Bloomberg Businessweek reports, the family that owns the land beneath the 31-year-old luxury co-op wants to sell it — and the $185 million that the co-op board offered could hit some residents with an assessment of more than $1 million each. “People are calling me to stop this from happening,” said attorney Adam Leitman Bailey, principal of his namesake firm, who has been contacted by some owners wanting to keep the sale, and the assessment, from happening. But equally concerning is how much the ground-lease rent would go up another, outside buyer. In that scenario, the board projects, a monthly maintenance fee of $2,100 would increase to $9,800 when the lease resets in 20124.

For two years, a group of service workers from the Marais at 520 W. 23rd St. has been trying to join the 32BJ Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Standing in their way is the building's five-member board. It has refused unionization, and has not replied to communications from union representatives, reports Chelsea Now. According to the story, 80 out of 107 residents signed a petition asking the board to allow the workers to join the union, but the board hasn't budged, not even to negotiate.

One resident, Community Board 4 member Lowell Kern, decided to tell the service workers' story with an exhibition of photos and video that documents their two-year ordeal. Called "Beneath the Rails: Working Under the High Line," it took place in Kern's apartment. State Senator Brad Hoylman, State Assemblymember Richard Gottfried and City Councilmember Corey Johnson attended the exhibit's opening on Tuesday, Nov. 18. Also in attendance were 32BJ President Hector Figeuroa and 15 union members. At stake are a livable wage, comprehensive health insurance and a pension — non-union service workers who guard the doors and maintain the building reportedly get paid as little as $13 an hour, compared to the $21 an hour unionized workers receive, and are not offered the comprehensive health insurance and pension of their unionized counterparts.

It looks like construction is set to begin in early 2015 in an empty parking lot on West 97th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues — what will be home to the Jewish Home Lifecare (JHL), a 20-story nursing home. Years of pushback from residents of Park West Village, a condominium complex made up of seven buildings between 97th and 100th streets, with backing from a nearby school and elected officials, resulted in disappointment late last week, when the New York State Department of Health gave the nursing home the green light it's been waiting for. There are caveats, reports DNAInfo, which include putting up a temporary sound barrier, limiting noisy construction during yearly state testing and taking measures to ensure lead-laden dust doesn't spread to the surrounding area. The JHL says that's more than enough to assuage everyone's concerns. Park West Village residents and P.S. 163 parents say it's not enough. And City Councilman Mark Levine says it's not over. "Our fight continues in the legal and legislative arena to protect the community from this harmful project," he told DNAInfo.

Here was our situation: The developer of Strivers Gardens, our 170-unit condominium at 300 West 135th Street, wrote the bylaws and gave himself an overwhelming voting majority. By law, that majority is supposed to have diminished over the years, but for various reasons, including our own ignorance, it never did. He had about 27 percent voting majority. We don't have one unit per vote — each of the non-developer other units has less than 0.5 percent, so it takes about 64 of our votes to equal his 27 percent, which has rendered it impossible for us to elect our own condo board members. That is, until we learned of a way to solve our problem.

A doorman who helped save the life of an elderly tenant trapped in her apartment for two days with a broken hip. A porter who collapsed on smoke-filled stairs after having helped get residents out of their apartments during a fire. An engineer and former New York City Department of Buildings inspector who became the super for a six-building, 1,700-apartment complex. They and 18 other city residential and office workers each took home a prize as the best in their categories in the 2014 Building Service Workers Awards.

In the ever-amusing annals of things co-op and condo boards shouldn't do, one of them is breaking into an apartment during a legal dispute. This wouldn't seem to be a point of which boards, or people in general, need reminding. But at the Park South co-op, at 200 Central Park South in Manhattan, that's just what the board did during an ongoing lawsuit — and even though the shareholder was in the building at the time.

The human body is a beautiful thing ... except for that guy on the nude beach over there, or that lady with the thing, or whoever that is staring at me out of my mirror. Oh, wait.... Anyway, the point is that we should get to pick and choose when or where we're looking at naked people. And according to the New York Daily News, the condo board of the Ritz Tower, at 465 Park Avenue, doesn't want its residents forced to gaze upon three floors plus rooftop hot tubs belonging to a “nudity friendly” spa next door. In fact, the board is suing the Spa Castle being built in The Galleria Condominium not only for this "public nuisance" but also for building up the roof in a way that blocks some apartments' views and violates a 1974 agreement with The Galleria's former owners. Yet Spa Castle, in response to a cease-and-desist letter, “actually accelerated the work being performed," the suit alleges. Only in Nude York, kids, only in Nude York.

What's with ground leases so much in the news lately? In our second item about them in a week, a consortium is paying $285 million for the land beneath Carnegie House, the 324-unit co-op at 100 West 57th Street. Since ground-lease rents are typically 6 percent of current market value, reports The Real Deal, rising New York real estate prices means the current $4.4 million rent the cooperative pays annually would be $27 million if the rent were to be reset today — so what's it going to be in 10 years, when the rent is scheduled to be reset? Which brings to mind a variation on the old joke: How do you get to Carnegie House? By having enough money to make ground-lease payments the size of Montana.

Discovering that your co-op or condo has a ground lease — a real-estate instrument in which your cooperative or condominium corporation owns the building but only leases the land, usually for periods of up to 99 years — can be unnerving. Why? Because you have to pay a monthly ground-rental fee atop your maintenance or common charges and because ground leases can be detrimental to sales: Lenders don't like to offer loans when the building has, say, less than 30 years left on a lease.

What do you do when your building doesn't own the land on which it sits? 

Yes, that's a thing — it's called a "ground lease," a real estate instrument in which a cooperative or a condominium corporation owns the building but only leases the land. Usually it's for long periods of up to 99 years, after which, theoretically, the landowner can tell the board to move the building elsewhere. And in the meantime, your monthly payments include ground rent.