1160 THIRD AVENUE

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. This week, there's no bigger news for boards than of the legislative mess in Albany that will send co-op and condo property taxes sky-high unless Gov. Cuomo and company take action. On the Upper East Side, a co-op board sues a sponsor that won't let go even after 24 years, a doorman charges a management company with allowing racist rants, there's power from the sun in Sunset Park and much more.

Sponsor. An innocuous little two-syllable word. But in the roughhouse world of New York real estate, the sponsor — the party who creates a co-op or condo either by converting a rental building or erecting a new structure — is often seen as a villain. Sponsor, in the eyes of many co-op shareholders and condo unit-owners, is one very dirty little word. in part two of our three-part special report on sponsors retaining control past the deadlines set by law, we look at how owning even less than one-third of a co-op's apparent can thwart progress and change.