The Goldilocks Principle

When two people combine households and share the costs of running their lives, often the arrangement is called marriage. When 35 people do the same and live on one particular corner of Lower Manhattan, it’s called my co-op. In both cases, harmony — or lack thereof — is affected by each person’s relationship to money.

Not surprisingly, we’re on the same page as all shareholders when it comes to maintenance increases: We don’t want them. And assessments: We don’t want them either. But other financial decisions are specific to our co-op’s culture. The reserve fund is an example. We don’t have one. In our 44-year history, we’ve never had one. When the board announces an assessment at the annual meeting to pay for an upcoming project, inevitably one shareholder states the obvious: If we had a reserve fund, we wouldn’t need the assessment. Just as predictably, the board will ask for a show of hands to gauge interest in increasing maintenance to create this pot of money — and none go up. 

As in a marriage, how we operate makes sense only to us. According to a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, people make financial decisions based 90% on emotion and only 10% on logic. My co-op’s penny-pinching board reflects the not-always-logical will of the shareholders. Regardless of who serves, regardless of their age, profession and, over time, increasingly flush personal finances, board members represent our overwhelming desire to push expenses down the road until they are absolutely unavoidable — even if, and usually when, the cost is higher than if the project had been done sooner. Often, we end up spending more in the long run, but peace is achieved by everyone holding on to their money a little bit longer. 

While I disagree with this strategy — often as the lone shareholder voting to fix, replace and modernize right away — I’ve also seen how the board’s reluctance to spend is vital to shareholder trust. If a project is finally going forward, we know it’s because there was no alternative. Still, as though unaware both of its own credibility and the performative nature of shareholder grumbling, our board always seems surprised by the lack of real pushback when it asks us to open our wallets.

After my first assessment, I, too, was surprised. The project was new windows, the bill for which I was more than willing to pay, no longer charmed by the authentic loft experience of wearing a knit hat and layers of long johns indoors. The board called a special meeting to gently explain the cost, the payment plan and the installation schedule. Based on the few annual meetings I’d attended, I expected to hear my neighbors insist that we could eke out at least one more winter of cold drafts from faulty seals and one more summer of panes spontaneously closing from broken balances. Instead, the questions focused on how comparatively simple or difficult the new windows would be to clean. Would they be easier to open and reach the outer panels than the old ones? Would the new screens slide up and down? And my favorite, given our thriftiness: Could we hire a company to clean them on a regular schedule?

The same happened when our lobby was finally renovated after 37 years of fits and no starts. Not only did no one complain about the assessment, the only major discussion — and it was good-natured — dealt with selecting art to hang on our new wall. 

In my building, when we reach the point that procrastinating is no longer feasible, we move forward using the Goldilocks Principle. Like the fairytale child who tested each of the three bears’ breakfasts and furniture before deciding which was “just right,” we consider all of our options and then choose not the best or the worst, not the most attractive or the ugliest, not the most deluxe or the most basic. Most of the time, “just right” for us is the midway option. Twenty years ago, we replaced our wonky 20-year-old elevator. Sort of. We refurbished the motor and repaneled the cab. Because it was a midway job, not surprisingly we were again faced with a wonky elevator 20 years later. If the people on the higher floors hadn’t grown tired of the long, hot climb when the elevator was out of service the entire summer, we might have lived a bit longer with occasional outages. But no, once again we made the middle choice and glued a few new parts in our old motor and continue to hope we get a couple more years out of it before the only option is a complete redo.

If we were in the co-op equivalent of marriage counseling, we’d admit to living paycheck to paycheck and probably relying a little too much on credit and magical thinking. But if asked if we were open to more productive alternatives, I don’t know if we’d do anything differently. As my father-in-law used to say about any arrangement in a relationship that caused no harm and kept the peace, “It’s cheap at twice the price.”