A landlord’s lot is not a happy one
From the
Neighbors thrown together by financial happenstance or the luck of the real estate market are sometimes shocked to find themselves acting out childhood angst and rivalries at the condo or co-op board.
“What do you mean, you’re behind on your condo fees?”
Though the Times doesn’t give you the moral of this epic of the perils of group ownership, or its implications for affordable housing, I will — once you have read to the end!
“You mean I have to learn something?”
But first, a bit of fun:
Ever since the Future Condominium, a modern glass and aluminum tower on
opened in 1993, Avital Shimshowitz
Portrait of a delinquent? What do you think the Times thinks?
and her neighbors have lived in simple peace and harmony, at least most of the time, in this vertical
“It’s a jungle out there.”
So Ms. Shimshowitz, who is the manager for the Sean John men’s clothing store on Fifth Avenue, was surprised at what happened when she decided to run for the board of managers at the annual meeting last June.
The day before the rescheduled [condo association] meeting, the condo board president quietly filed a lien against Ms. Shimshowitz, after she had missed a single $100 installment payment on an assessment the month before.
The lien, filed without a telephone call or any notice, or even a vote of the entire board, caught Ms. Shimshowitz by surprise, she said, and she did not notice until the balloting was over that the footnote next to her name on the ballot indicated that she was “in arrears.” Under the bylaws of many condominiums, owners with unpaid liens cannot serve on the board.
It started with a series of seemingly trivial disputes:
The conflict over Ms. Shimshowitz is just one of many; there have been:
[1] disputes over the audited financial statements,
Regardless of tenure, a large multi-family property is a complex financial asset and a business with very large cash flows. It requires more than intelligence, more than credentials in extraneous disciplines, no matter how respected. (You have not really experienced this until you have seen, as we did in Cambridge, Nobel-Prize-winning economists make fools of themselves arguing the species of an old tree they are trying to preserve to block a development …)
[2] complaints that old-timers had more than one storage locker downstairs, and
Group entities that run initially on personal relationships must establish procedures, else they inevitably succumb to perceived and real favoritism:
[3] accusations that a former board president absconded with thousands of dollars of granite paving stones.
Group entities must also turn square corners, with procedures and approvals always in writing.
We’re here to examine the books:
“And the dead were judged by what was in the books, by what they had done.” – Revelations,
Often they confuse the personal with the professional:
Julio Marquez, an investment banker with an M.B.A. from Harvard, was the treasurer then and he was outraged by the suggestion that he had mismanaged the building’s finances. “It was the most ridiculous accusation I have ever heard,” he said.
Personal-professional confusion is more likely without proper procedures:
The mystery of the stones,
as chronicled in angry correspondence over many months, began when the granite pavers were pulled up from the plaza outside the building to make room for landscaping some years before, and had been stored ever since. Mr. Simms said that the Fire Department had objected to the way the stones were stored, but that when the building staff tried to put them out as trash, the Sanitation Department refused to take them away.
Then with permission from the building staff, he said, he removed some of the stored stones, a few bricks at a time, and drove them to his summer house on eastern
He got permission, too ….
… to take the paving stones.
If there is a conflict, it can swiftly escalate:
After several heated exchanges, the new board president and two other board members went to the 17th Precinct station to file a grand larceny complaint against Mr. Simms, but the police took no action.
Escalation meets counter-escalation:
Eventually, because the board said the redesign of the lobby required matching granite stone, Mr. Simms brought the granite stones back, but he is still furious. He filed a libel and slander suit last July, dismissed on a technicality but expected to be refiled, based on the various e-mail messages and memos distributed to his neighbors.
Including petty vindictiveness:
One evening Mr. Urbont and another board member, Yolanda Pessina, an architect who is overseeing the lobby renovation, confronted Ms. Shimshowitz in her apartment about some comments she had made in an elevator, defending Mr. Simms and disparaging the rest of the board. She said they told her that since she was the only one in the building to get an installment plan, she should stop complaining.
After the angry confrontation, in front of her 9-year-old daughter, Ms. Shimshowitz decided to fight back by running for the board. She had no complaint with the conduct of the former president. “Larry Simms is the straightest, most honest guy in the world,” she said. Ms. Shimshowitz paid the $100 installment on the assessment due in July on schedule, but by then Mr. Marquez and the treasurer, Andrew Brint, said they had decided that since she had violated her agreement, she owed the entire $800 still due on the assessment, and with late charges the lien totaled more than $1,300.
Don’t forget to be inconsistent, that’s always good for the story:
In the history of the Future, a lien had been filed only once before, against an owner who now owes about $30,000. At the time of the new lien, five apartments in the building owed $1,300 to $3,300 but had not had liens placed on their units, Mr. Simms said.
Lest you think that such foolishness is limited only to the Upper East Side Crust, the same stresses — personal versus professional, escalation, financial confusion, lack of property documentation or square corners — are universal in any form of group property ownership or control. They regularly arise in:
- Public housing.
- Resident councils.
- Low-income co-operatives.
Indeed, I know of very few situations where they don’t arise. As the Times comments:
In the worst cases some yearn for the clinical detachment of a rental building.
And that, you see, is the story’s moral:
The landlord serves a real role.
Ownership is a job. It demands professionalism and a property perspective independent of the personalities, and it is often best outsourced.
The owner must advocate for the property, against all comers, including its current residents.
