Tuesday, July 27, 2010

All A-Board

I've spent a lot of time lately explaining the difference between a co-op and a condo here in NYC to friends and family.  In a nutshell, it breaks down into what you own.  In a condo, you own your unit from the walls inward.  It is yours, you are a property owner, and you can (generally) sell it to whomever you like and do whatever like to it.  In a co-op, you own a share of the controlling interest in the building proportionate to the size of your unit, and you hold a permanent lease on your unit to live in.  So the apartment is not your property, and the co-op has a great deal of say in who you can sell it to and what you can do to it.

Fortunately, I now live in a condo.  Condos are rare in NYC, for reasons that aren't particularly clear to me.  Co-ops seem to be the norm in this town.  So I consider myself pretty lucky to have found a good one.  Still, both condos and co-ops are overseen by a Board of Directors.  In a co-op, the Board has near-limitless power, since they control essentially the whole building.  In a condo, the Board is not quite so omnipotent, but is still responsible for building management, maintenance, and generally keeping all the residents happy.  After all, someone needs to actually run the building.

Last week, we had our first Unit Owners meeting, where everyone in the building got together for the first time.  At this meeting were the Sponsor (the developer who built the building) and his lawyer, who officially transferred control of the building to the Owners (us).  The first thing we then had to do was elect our three-member Board of Directors.

At this point I should mention, everyone in this building is pretty cool.  Everyone I've met so far has been really nice, very open and welcoming.  It really makes me feel even better about living here.  Many of them are just like Lynn and I, young first-time homeowners.  I suppose that last one is actually the one possible downside: no one has owned an apartment, so no one has any condo or condo board experience.

Still, we had to elect a Board, and elect one we did.  Five of us volunteered, based on interested more than experience (since there was none among us).  We held sheets of paper in front of us with our unit numbers, and stood in a line along the wall in front of everyone, like a police line-up.  We went down the line telling a little bit about ourselves and what experience might be relevant.  And everyone voted on the neighbors they just met, based solely on those few minutes of talking.  I was elected, along with another guy on my floor, and the guy who lives directly above me.  The only thing we knew was that we had our work cut out for us.

And it's true.  We met for the first time, and are still in the process of even identifying all the things we have to take care of.  It's a long list that includes everything from hiring someone to take out the trash to dealing with bank accounts and financial stability and buying a grill for the roof deck.  But though I'm not exactly sure what's next yet, I'm really confident about this.  The three of us are all on the same page, we get along really well, and we're all having fun figuring out what we're supposed to be doing.  It'll be an interesting experience, but a good one.

Best of all, we're creating a community in our little building.  And we're off to a great start.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Disputed Territory

When I first came to NYC, back in 2003, it was my dream to get an apartment right in the middle of things.  I idolized, as so many transplants do, the Village.  Little did I know what geographic trouble I was getting myself into.  The original Village, Greenwich Village, was centered in what is today known as the West Village.  To the east, appropriately, is the East Village--which was originally part of the Lower East Side but renamed for real estate appeal long ago.

I settled in a little studio on Waverly Place and Mercer St.  When people asked me where I lived, I said "the Village," marveling at how incredibly cool that sounded.  But then they'd say, "East or West?" and I was stumped.  Some people insist the dividing line between East and West is Broadway.  Others swear that it's Fifth Avenue.  Maps, even official-looking city maps, are just as fickle, saying one, the other, or sometimes referencing both.  Mercer Street, were I lived, is right in between Broadway and Fifth Avenue.  Thus, each time I tried to describe where my little apartment was to anyone who lived in the city, it generally sparked a long--and often heated--debate on the boundaries of the Village.

Never one to shy away from cartographic controversy, I now find myself in a similar neighborhood border situation.  Our new apartment in Brooklyn sits between two prominent north-south streets, Court Street and Smith Street.  These streets are both labeled by several sources, maps, neighborhood guides, and city resources as the dividing boundary between the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill to the west and Boerum Hill to the east.

Cobble Hill was originally known as Ponkiesbergh, and was settled in the 1640's by the Dutch farmers in the area.  It gained its current name from being a small hill (the highest point is at today's intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street) where cobble stones were disposed.  These stones were used as ballast in the trade ships coming from Europe, and were not needed when the ships left New York laden with American goods, so they were dumped in what was then just outside of the town of Brooklyn.  Althought grouped into the generic "South Brooklyn" designation with everything else south of Atlantic Avenue for many decades, the name Cobble Hill has been in city documents since as early as the 1840s.  The high point itself was even used as a fort during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, though nothing remains of either today.

Boerum Hill, meanwhile, has a slightly more quiet history.  The area was named after the Boerum family whose farm covered most of the area in colonial times.  Its development followed closely along with Cobble Hill.  Some folks will tell you the name "Boerum Hill" is a product of gentrification in the area, like DUMBO or calling Hell's Kitchen "Clinton."  This is because, like Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill was lumped into the "South Brooklyn" designation well into the 1950s.  However, there are plenty of records showing the name "Boerum Hill" going back as far as the colonial farm itself.  So while the name may have been resurrected after South Brooklyn lost its appeal, Boerum Hill was the original name given to what is now the neighborhood.

Interestingly, in the early 1920s a large group of Mohawk families moved to Boerum Hill from a reservation in Quebec.  They came to NYC as ironworkers to build the new skyscrapers as, unlike their European-American neighbors, they were comfortable working at the dizzying heights of the tallest buildings in the world.  But as crane and building technology improved, the Mohawks eventually left as well, heading west where there was more work available.

So which neighborhood should it be?  I see one strong argument for each.  Historically, the actual hill that Cobble Hill refers to was centered on what is today an intersection of two streets one block away.  That puts our building literally "on" Cobble Hill, so it would make sense to call it "in" Cobble Hill as well.  On the other hand, the city government draws the line between Community Board 2, which includes Boerum Hill, and Community Board 6, which includes Cobble Hill, along Court Street.  This means that, as far as our representation in the city government is concerned, we're in Boerum Hill.

Though I suppose I could avoid the issue entirely, since nearly everyone in Brooklyn knows exactly what I mean when I say I live "around the corner from Trader Joe's."  As for the Manhattan dwellers, all I have do is say "Brooklyn" and watch their eyes glaze over.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Episode IV: A New Home

The great Suburban Exile of 2010 has ended.  After a month of living off in the 'burbs and commuting into the city, we're finally settled in our apartment.  That we own.  But it wasn't easy getting there, naturally.

Once June had hit and we were living in Connecticut, we had a new deadline to worry over.  June 30th was the last day we could close to claim the several-thousand-dollar First Time Home-buyer Tax Credit that the government began early last year as part of the larger economic stimulus.  We had the usual runaround, hearing "of course we'll make it," and, "don't worry about it."  But that's what we heard in March.  And April.  And May.

While our bank had pulled its approval of the building, another bank had gone ahead and approved it.  That bank closed several apartments in the building and our future neighbors started moving in.  We abandoned our bank, and started from scratch with this other bank that had approved people.  The new bank was wonderful; they accomplished in a week what the first bank to two months to do.  They rushed everything through for us, and all was moving quickly.

But not quickly enough.  June was flying by, and we were getting closer and closer to losing the tax credit.  Delay after delay we could handle, albeit grudgingly, but losing the credit would have been an extra slap.  Finally, as the end of June neared, our lawyer, the bank's lawyer, and the building developer's lawyer set a date to close and hoped that we'd have the final green light from the bank by then.  That date was June 30th, 10am.

Around 10pm on June 29th, we got a call from our lawyer.  We're going to close!  Probably.  There was some confirmation of funds transfer from the bank that we needed, and that hadn't come in yet.  Our lawyer told us to be ready at 10am, but not to show up at the closing table until he called.  Just in case.

The next morning we had our final walk-through in the apartment before the closing.  We walked around looking everything over one last time.  But mostly we were just wondering, would this really happen?  10am came and went.  10:30am came and went.  Finally, the phone rang, and we were off to the closing table.  Two hours, and many signatures and people shuffling, later we were homeowners.

Wasting no time, we immediately scheduled the movers for the following Monday and painted over the weekend.  It's good to be home.