One of the biggest issues in the real estate industry over the past year has been the speculation that government-sponsored mortgage programs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be ending. For the past 70 years, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac …
In today’s legislative world, housing is a big item. Rent-payers, condo owners, co-op shareholders, and developers all have their particular interests—and they don’t necessarily mesh. In the meantime, the ongoing recession threatens all …
As a construction attorney I can say that it is rare that a change is made in the law which revolutionizes the design industry. Up until now, the laws in the State of New York only allowed architectural and engineering firms to be owned…
The sad reality is that when a hurricane, flood or fire strikes, often the greatest damage is not caused by the crisis itself, but rather by poor decision making by boards in the aftermath of the event. In the aftermath of a d…
Many co-ops in New York lease, rather than own, the land beneath their apartment building. For the board of a leasehold co-op, navigating a contested land valuation, in which the amount of the co-op’s ground rent is determined through a…
Despite some admissions of error from the city, and a temporary cap on increases in assessed valuations, co-op officers and elected officials from Eastern Queens who in recent weeks have declared a “tax revolt” aren’t backing down. …
You may live in the most well-run and self-sufficient building in the city, but even in Gotham, no building is an island. Developments from Penn South in Manhattan to Co-op City in the Bronx to the small six-story condo building in the…
In the course of human events, it's almost inevitable that somewhere, at some point, tempers will flare and someone will say something awful about someone else. It can happen after the PTA meeting, in the gym, at the office...even in o…
As gasoline prices rise with increasing summer demand, building administrators' attention has turned sharply to the cost of energy, and ways to trim fat from their overall energy budgets. Yet for the nation’s nearly 60 million…
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 …