Habitat Preview June 2012 : Page 2
MAINTENANCE Is it responsible or delusional to raise it? PHOTOS : JENNIFER WU By Tom Soter I T IS A POINT OF PRIDE with many co-op board members in New York City. “We haven’t had a maintenance increase in my 16 years on the board,” says Stu Hochron, board president of the 40-unit Bond Parc Condominium in Great Neck. “This is the fi rst year we’ve done a maintenance increase in fi ve years,” boasts Robert DiMartini, vice president at the 404-unit Kimberly Gardens in Yonkers. “We have not raised maintenance in several years; we make every effort not to,” notes Marleen Levi, president at the 75-unit 2260 Benson Avenue co-op in Brooklyn. Yet is this pride misplaced? Like the Republican Party’s rigid “no new taxes” pledge, is the resistance to raising maintenance an albatross that boards are placing around their necks regardless of the consequences? Consider the sad saga of a 56-unit Queens condominium. Although the property’s longtime (and now former) manager recalls that “everything was going fine,” the secretary of the board argues that the finances were out of control. “I was overseas for two years,” he says. “When I came back in 2007, we owed $75,000 to $80,000 on our water bill. The manager didn’t pay the elevator contract. We had a special assessment for a year in 2009 that was supposed to go toward the water bill, but it didn’t.” CATCH-22 14 HABITAT JUNE 2012 WWW.HABITATMAG.COM
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