While high-rise residential buildings put many people and families in very close proximity to one another, living side-by-side doesn’t automatically turn a group of people into a community—sometimes it even has the opposite effect. Lives …
Often, the best, most successful boards and communities share the same combination of habits and traits; all the while, the worst, least successful boards and communities share the same habits and traits, as well. Case in point: there isn’…
Someone once said that "People who say that small things don't bother them have never slept in a room with a mosquito." The truth is that there are little irritations—otherwise known as pet peeves—about a job, relationship, or other …
A glance at a chart of average temperatures in New York City during the summer months (not withstanding the recent heat wave we’ve had) reveals typically it gets into the 80s during the daytime in July and August, and cools off at night…
Social media is a phrase that has disparate meanings depending on the demographic. While those 60 and older might say email and websites are social mediums, those younger consider these to be otherwise antiquated preferring texting, Fa…
The economy cratered—to use a term in popular parlance at that time—in September, 2008, with the collapse of too-big-to-fail Lehman Brothers. While the measures undertaken by the federal government and the Federal Reserve averted complet…
A few years ago, when I lived in the East Village—in a one-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up—I had a creepy experience when the cable guy came to hook up our service. He arrived in a beat-up windowless van that looked like it had been boosted …
One of my five-year-old daughter’s favorite YouTube clips involves an elaborately decorated house, whose thousands of colored Christmas lights were programmed to flicker, strobe, wave, and blink to the tune of the Trans-Siberian Orchest…
As the directors of a cooperative corporation, co-op board members have a number of duties to their shareholders, chief among them to preserve and improve their investment and to maintain and/or improve shareholders’ standard of living …
The last couple of years have been tempestuous for everyone involved in the real estate industry, and the New York market is certainly no exception. But the city’s residential real estate is extraordinary in that during the current rece…