MANHATTAN

The vast majority of condominium developers, we're sure, aren't looking to do anything shady with the buildings they put up. Yet sometimes when a developer (a.k.a. a "sponsor" in this context) still controls the board of a new condo, well, things happen. And according to the website of the law firm Adam Leitman Bailey, P.C, what happened at one Manhattan condominium is that the current board found that the earlier, sponsor-controlled board had signed a mortgage to buy a superintendent's apartment — under terms the law firm calls "outrageously usurious." They also call it "novel fraud." Gee, guys, don't hold back — tell us what you really think!

What striking workers and even some residents of The Printing House call bullying by its developer and condo-board head, Myles Horn, continues in one of the more blatant examples of the haves vs. the have nots. Apartments there sell for as high as $6 million, with one four-bedroom unit now on sale for $14 million. So how does this square with non-union concierges and cleaners making as little as $12 an hour, asks The Amsterdam News  — which notes that longtime concierge Arturo Vergara has to buy his own health insurance for $800 a month.

Part of the problem, the paper reports, is that to run the staff, Horn hired  Planned Companies, a New Jersey firm with "a history of labor violations and documented ties to organized crime." And since most New York City luxury buildings pay staff a decent wage, the issue appears to be, for Horn, a matter of won't, not can't. "They want to make a name for themselves as innovative developers," SEIU Local 32BJ President Hector Figueroa said in a statement to the paper, "but instead, they are becoming symbols of the irresponsible 1 percent.”

Just weeks after the new Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ contract was renewed, rumblings of union-busting and unfair working conditions are thrusting handymen, porters and doormen back into the spotlight.

Cuba. Chile. The Upper East Side. What do they have in common? If you go by a lawsuit filed by some shareholders at 1035 Fifth Avenue, each has been the site of a coup. The New York Daily News reports that former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia CEO Charles Koppelman and others claim there's been a "corporate coup," with the results of a May 13 co-op board election having been overturned after the building's managing agent "found" a proxy that had been set aside "by mistake." Famed interior designer Richard Mishaan, newly elected as board president, was deposed in favor of former Goldman Sachs chairman Eugene Atkinson. Judge Nancy Bannon of New York County Supreme Court, Civil Branch, has barred the co-op board from meeting pending a hearing on June 27.

The smokers were outvoted by more than two to one — yet because the vote to ban smoking at The Vaux Condominium didn't reach the required 2/3 supermajority, the tally of 48.85 vs. 23.68 means that less than a quarter of the voting residents have dictated their "right" to a spread carcinogenic smoke throughout a closed environment.

Unit-owner Candice Elliott told The New York Observer that the board failed to pass the ban because "they framed the issue in terms of smoking only" and complained of "an activist board whose members saw themselves as being on the vanguard of this anti-smoking movement." Zeckendorf Towers last year became the largest condo in New York City and possibly the nation to go smoke-free.

Diana Harfouche, former board president of the Upper East Side, Manhattan, condominium The Impala, ended her time as board leader by overseeing the successful transformation of the property into a smoke-free zone. It was an effort that took the strategic skills of an Eisenhower — yet even so might not have succeeded had the initiative not started with the residents themselves.

Call it the battle over the bikes. New York City's year-old Citi Bike bicycle-sharing program may be suffering many well-publicized problems with its docking stations, but now some buildings are challenging its very existence. Four co-op and condo boards have taken legal action to get the fixtures removed or modified.

May the city install bike-share terminals in front of your building? That was the issue discussed in Cambridge Owners Corp. v. New York City Department of Transportation.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) decided to install a bike-share station in front of The Cambridge, a roughly 137-apartment co-op at 175 West 13th Street in Manhattan. The Citi Bike program consists of 6,000 bicycles docked in more than 300 self-service share stations around the city. Members of the public can rent the bikes from, and return them to, any station in the system, which is open around the clock.

Manhattan's Zeckendorf Towers last week became the largest condominium in New York City, and possibly the nation, to go completely smoke-free. In the strongest voter turnout in the 26-year-old building's history, 85% of its 647 unit-owners voted 83.5% in favor of the amendment prohibiting new residents from smoking in apartments — public areas already being covered under law. A grandfather clause grants existing owner-residents three years before their units become subject to the smoke-free policy.

New York's infamous 1950s white-brick buildings have long been considered white elephants — and at the storied Greenwich Village co-op 2 Fifth Avenue, a $30.7 million assessment to replace such aged and dangerous bricks came out to an elephantine six-figure payment per shareholder. In a four-year odyssey chronicled by The New York Times, old board-members got booted out, new ones came in, building management got replaced and a three-tier assessment plan was created to ensure that all owners could pay and not default. And despite recriminations early on, the building's community wound up bonding strongly. Find out how the residents and board members pulled it off — and what gold cuff links shaped like hardhats have to do with it.