MANHATTAN

May unit-owners transfer their condominium unit when to do so avoids foreclosure of that unit to pay a debt? 

Sofia Frankel owned a condominium apartment at 160 West 66th Street in Manhattan. She had been a broker at Goldman Sachs when Jeffrey and Lauren Sardis entrusted her with some $19 million to invest on their behalf. They remained clients when Frankel left to join Lehman Brothers but, by 2004, complained that she had fraudulently churned their accounts, causing them more than $9.5 million in losses. The Sardises began an arbitration against Frankel and Lehman, and about two weeks before Lehman filed for bankruptcy, the court awarded the Sardises $2.5 million, holding both Frankel and Lehman responsible.

Dec. 19, 2013 — Maro Goldstone is a shareholder of Gracie Terrace Apartment Corporation, at 605 East 82nd Street, a.k.a. 1 Gracie Terrace, in Manhattan. She and her husband, Thomas R. Newman, suffered extensive damage to their apartment when a 10,000-gallon water tank above them overflowed in 2003. The co-op's plan for remediation required a 50-square-foot reduction in the 1,400-plus-square-foot apartment. Goldstone objected, claiming the proposal violated the terms of the proprietary lease. So: May a cooperative corporation, when repairing an apartment, reduce its size?

As a rule, co-op and condo boards achieve fiscal security through conservative strategies and long-range planning. But occasionally a dash of creativity can help.

That has been the experience of the co-op at 90 Riverside Drive, which enjoys an enviable financial profile with low maintenance and solid capital reserves. The shareholders have never been hit with an assessment. But as the co-op board got ready to refinance the mortgage, a round of mandatory Local Law 11 repairs came due in the summer of 2012, a year before the board's latest 10-year mortgage expired. Once the LL11 work began, unanticipated repairs and expenses arose. By the following summer, with the mortgage about to expire, some sort of interim backup financing became crucial for the co-op to cover the unanticipated bills.

Updated March 13, 2014 — Psst. C'mere. I got a deal for ya. You buy these commercial condo spaces that I'm sellin' as the condominium sponsor and I'll tell ya what: You don't gotta listen to the board. You buy these units, you got veto power over any board decision that affects you. That means you can tell 'em not to raise yer common charges. And it's all perfectly legal. Just sign here on the dotted line. Or I guess these lines aren't dotted anymore. OK — sign here on the plain straight line….

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. This week, one of the world's richest condominiums has a big, circular driveway it won't let limo drivers use. Why should it? The NYPD looks the other way as a half-dozen or more limos idle daily in a no-parking zone, spewing fumes to other, less connected buildings. Very nice, 15 Central Park West. Meanwhile, rent-controlled seniors in a co-op are forced to evict their son, and a co-op board president admits that people were ahead of him in line when he took a four-bedroom apartment at the affordable-housing East Midtown Plaza. He doesn't have six people in his family like City rules say, but so what? He's just practicing to be the kind of people who live in 15 Central Park West.

Condominium associations, unlike cooperatives, can't turn down a prospective purchaser except in one way — by exercising its "right of first refusal" and buying the apartment instead. It doesn't happen often, since condo boards usually have just a short amount of time to come up with the cash or let the sale go through. And if the association doesn't have enough money on hand and can't get a conventional loan in time, what's a board to do?

To quote Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior: "You come to me."

Nigen and Yvonne Vosper lived at 555 W. 160th Street in Manhattan on December 24, 2008, when Nigen slipped and fell on ice as he was leaving the building at 7:55 a.m. Note the time, because it becomes important. The following month, he filed a lawsuit for personal injuries, alleging that the building had "created a dangerous and hazardous condition on [the] outside landing by removing a step that was there and replacing it with a downward sloping landing, without a handrail."

Updated March 13, 2014 — Psst. C'mere. I got a deal for ya. You buy these commercial condo spaces that I'm sellin' as the condominium sponsor and I'll tell ya what: You don't gotta listen to the board. You buy these units, you got veto power over any board decision that affects you. That means you can tell 'em not to raise yer common charges. And it's all perfectly legal. Just sign here on the dotted line. Or I guess these lines aren't dotted anymore. OK — sign here on the plain straight line….

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. This week, why didn't anyone tell Co-op City's residents there were outbreaks of Legionnaires' Disease? Why did a community board recommend a restaurateur's liquor license over the objections of people living in the same building? And why did a smokers'-rights group butt out of a condo forum? Plus: You can't take your kid's stroller into the passenger elevator? Seriously? 

Phase one was straightforward, at least on paper. There were no mechanicals under this first section of sidewalk, so it was a simple matter of replacing the vault's corroded cast-iron beams and pillars with steel I-beams, setting a metal "cue deck" on top of them, pouring and waterproofing a concrete slab, and finally pouring the sidewalk on top of it.