CO-OP / CONDO CAUCUS Q&A, P.2

How important do you think co-ops and condos are to the economic health of New York?

They're very important because first of all, it is affordable housing. Everyone talks about, "Oh, we need affordable housing." In most of this city, co-ops are an affordable way to own a home. That's where people go first. So you are, you are a tenant, but at the same time you're an owner, and I think, it's important, it's good for the long-term health of a city, just to have people who own instead of rent.

In June 2012, the co-op tax abatement ends. Do you think it should be extended or should another solution be sought?

I'll say both, how's that? I was one of the first co-sponsors of the law that gave cooperators this tax abatement. And the reason that the tax abatement was put in place is, in lieu of a big solution, let's give them a tax abatement temporarily. Now, it's been over a decade of us passing extension after extension. I'm not for eliminating that extension until we have the solution. But let's get the solution, and that's going to be one of the focuses of our co-op/condo caucus, to get the city to look at the tax [abatement], at the tax classes, and start realizing that co-op owners, especially those who live in their co-ops, aren't like investors. Some buy houses, some buy co-ops. I'm not naive enough to say we're going to have the solution right away, especially in this economy [where] people are distracted. But I think we can get a solution in the near future. I'd like to see that tax abatement in place for the future, incorporated into the tax code.

Do you think that having the caucus in the city council will help find a solution?

Well, that's my hope, and I wish I could tell you that, right now, because we established this caucus, the world's going to change and that cooperators will be treated as the home-owners they are. That is the goal. One of the goals for this caucus is to make sure that there is tax fairness. Real estate taxes are killing people – water rates are killing these homeowners, who are sometimes trying to make it, paycheck to paycheck. A lot of those seniors are living on fixed incomes and when their rates go up, it causes them a lot of problems. In order for them to stay in their homes, they need to get some tax fairness.

I'd like to push the mayor's office into establishing a commission to finally review this, to come up with a way to do this that will be fair. I think that can be done, and it's something that was supposed to be done when the tax abatement was first put in place. If there's one thing this co-op and condo caucus can accomplish is, by getting a lot of voices together, we can organize as a group and say, "Mr. Mayor, we need to come up with a solution and move forward in changing that."

City regulations keep adding incremental costs, such as having to pay for a third-party elevator inspector and for a third-party water tank inspector. And then the new green bills add costs. Can co-ops and condos get some relief?

That is an example of one of the motivations behind what we are pushing. While the green bills had some very good things about them, they had a lot of mandates in there that we want to see on buildings that are owned by private interests, that are big office buildings and towers. But on co-op owners, these are their homes and they're being treated unfairly by those mandates. Those costs, as I said, are being directly passed on the shareholders. This isn't some mean landlord saying, "Well, you're going to charge me, I'm going to charge my tenants." Because then the market might work, the tenants might say, "Okay, you're raising my rent, I'm moving somewhere else." Shareholders can't do that. They have an investment here, they own the shares of stock, they can't go anywhere.

Is there anything you would like to tell the board directors who govern these buildings and the property management readers who operate the buildings that they should expect to look forward to from this new caucus?
I don't want to overstate how important this new caucus will be. We're going to treat co-op owners as something special and try to make people aware that they need to be treated as special interests, in that they are not your typical investor as the law often treats them, and they are not a landlord. I know it must be a source of a lot of frustration for boards, all those hours they put in, volunteering, on behalf of a co-op, and they're treated as though they're a landlord. It's an outrage.

Photo, page 1, by Carol Ott. This page, from City Council site.

Adapted from Habitat May 2010. Join our Archive >>