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Of Mice and Men
In 1973, I received my Pest Control license and started my business. My first job was in a building in the South Bronx. The owner of the building had given me the keys to the basement, and I remember driving up to the building and thinking it odd that there were no other buildings on that block, but I didn't give it another thought. Upon entering the 20-by-40-foot basement with my trusty flashlight, I saw one lone bulb dangling from the middle of the room. Its light didn't come close to reaching the walls. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloominess, I played my flashlight onto the tops of the walls, where I saw hundreds of pairs of red eyes looking back at me.
Read MoreGet Soaked!
To swim a straight fifty-foot lap, the majority of New York's eight million souls have no choice but to brave the Hudson River. This is not the case, however, for residents of Trump Place at 200 Riverside Boulevard, who merely need to head downstairs to their building's indoor pool, part of a 6,000-square-foot spa on the first floor. Following a bracing swim, they can spend a minute or two being "revitalized" beneath the spa's heated mineral waterfall. Read More
Melding Design with Comfort
The bathroom is one of the most used rooms in the
home—albeit in short intervals. We all have our own vision of
the ultimate bathroom, from natural light and optimal storage space, to
telephones, Jacuzzi baths and flat screen TVs. But until you’ve been
through the process, it’s hard to get a handle on just what goes into
a successful bathroom remodeling project.
Read More
Going Up?
In a vertical city like New York where it’s not uncommon for people to wake up in a mid-rise apartment building before heading to work in a midtown skyscraper, it’s easy to take elevators for granted. Easy, that is, until something goes wrong with one. And when something does go wrong, it can even end up in the next day’s headlines—like in April, 2005, when deliveryman Ming Kuang Chen spent three days trapped in the elevator of a Bronx high-rise. Or like last May, when several young tourists were stuck very publicly inside the glass elevator cage at Apple’s brand new Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. Read More
Bringing Water to the Masses
The skyline of New York City is unique, if not for the soaring glass, steel, concrete and brick skyscrapers that create caverns in the sky, but for the redwood and cedar water tanks that sit on rooftops and hearken to days gone by. Read More
Know Holes Barred
Water leaks are the bane of many an apartment owner—and many a building superintendent. The innocent drip-drip-drip sound can augur waterfall-like hardship if not properly addressed. Leaks can cause major structural damage, ruin property, and set the stage for a potentially worse problem: mold growth. Read More
Going Green
Time was, if the tiles in your building’s front foyer got grimy, your super would pour some ammonia or bleach in a bucket, grab the nearest mop, and get down to business. If a drain was slow, out came the heavy-duty industrial solvents, and down the hatch. Today however, things are different in a great many buildings. There’s been a shift away from harsh, potentially dangerous cleaners and chemicals in residential buildings, and more and more boards and managers are requiring their building staff members to shelve the strong stuff in favor of gentler, less volatile “green” products. Read More
Knowledge is Key
Residential buildings are complicated entities—their various operating systems require maintenance and occasional repairs to remain in good working order. Sometimes maintenance can be carried out by the super or handyperson—sometimes it can’t. In the latter situation, it’s necessary to call in the help of a professional. Either way, it falls to the building super or the manager to decide whether a particular problem can be dealt with in-house or needs the attention of a specialist. For this reason, building administration and management—not just the super—need to have a certain amount of knowledge about their building’s structure and systems in order to do their jobs most efficiently. Read More
Caution Ahead
For many co-op and condo owners, watching the work crews arrive and the scaffolding ascend into the sky is akin to seeing the storm clouds gather on the horizon. They can be a harbinger of dark days to come, filled with noise, dust and inconvenience. Read More
The Shocking Truth
Today, almost all residents of co-op and condo buildings are computer-knowledgeable. They can tell you how many ports your PC has, how many gigabytes are in the hard drive, how to set up a printer, and more. Read More
After the Rain
Water damage and related liability has always been — and always will be — a big issue for co-op buildings and their shareholders. Few other issues are as complicated and potentially volatile as the challenge of tracing the leak, repairing it, and then sorting out the financial and legal ramifications of the problem. Read More
In the Drink
Plumbing is one of those things we take for granted yet without it, we might as well be back in the Stone Age. With dozens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people living in individual co-op and condo complexes, the importance of well-maintained indoor plumbing grows exponentially. Read More
Who’s Responsible for This?
Do you know what your problem is? More importantly, do you know if it’s actually your problem? In the world of condos and co-ops, understanding who is responsible for what in an apartment or in a building’s common areas isn’t always clear to apartment owners or shareholders. During the process of purchasing a condo unit or shares in a co-op, buyers are often so engrossed in the buying process itself that they don’t invest the effort needed to understand the ins- and-outs of ownership. This can lead to confusion, even anger, when the need for repairs starts popping up. Read More
Get Smart
Technical advances are being made in just about every area of our lives, and it’s no wonder that residential buildings are taking advantage of what’s available to make life better, simpler and more economical. More and more buildings are being built from the ground up with “intelligent” wiring and integrated operating systems, and existing buildings are getting in on the act as well, upgrading their communications, security, and indoor environmental systems to improve value and convenience for residents. Read More
The Heat is On
There are worse places to be than New York City in the winter — Minneapolis, for example, or Anchorage. Thanks to the North Atlantic current, the Big Apple doesn’t tend to freeze as hard as some other northern cities, but it still gets darned cold, and if your building suffers from heating problems, darned cold is cold enough. Most managers and board members tend to leave heating issues to their supers or building maintenance staff, but when the pipes are hissing and residents are up in arms and suffering from hypothermia, it can be helpful to understand what the problem is and how it might be fixed. Read More
The Fifth Wall
“Up On the Roof” is the title of a famous 1960s song by The Drifters about two New York inner-city lovers who go up to the roof just to get away from the “hustling crowd.” There’s a lot of romantic connotation to New York City’s rooftops—but how many people really know, or care, what’s up there? Read More
A Messy Situation
Garbage is a problem that every city has to deal with. In New York City alone, it's estimated that every person generates 2.5 pounds of garbage a day. Given a population of roughly 8 million, that garbage piles up into unsightly heaps very quickly, not to mention attracting vermin, too. Boards and management of buildings need to help tenants and shareholders understand proper trash disposal - to help city refuse workers dispose of it easily and efficiently, but also to reduce the unpleasant impact of garbage waiting for pick-up day. Read More
Breathing Well, Living Well
Given the number of breaths we all take on any given day, it's surprising that more attention isn't given to air quality. The subject usually only comes up when there's a problem - after people start sneezing or feeling ill. As with any potential health issue, however, the best time to talk about air quality problems is before they start. Preventive measures and a few doses of common sense can go a long way in keeping residents - and buildings - healthy. Read More
Super Supers
Locked out? Need your heat fixed? Perhaps your apartment has a problem with multi-legged creatures. Who are you going to call? Your building superintendent, of course. Your super is there to repair the broken, find the missing, and restore order when things go haywire. Read More
Building Anatomy 101
In many ways, a building is like the human body: If you want it to function properly over the long haul, you have to take care of it with clean fuel, regular maintenance, and the occasional visit to a specialist. And like a body's vital organs, a building's systems are integrated and reliant upon each other to function properly, so it's important to know the basics of how the various systems operate. It also means being able to recognize potential problems early so that they don't develop into something major. Read More
Ready for Anything
We all know it's a good idea to keep tabs on the everyday supplies needed to keep our household clean and running smoothly: simple things like light bulbs, cleaning products, and perhaps, the odd spare roll of duct tape. The same is true for co-op and condo buildings, though the scale is obviously much larger and therefore a little more complicated. Read More
X-Ray Vision
Time was, if a residential building was suffering heat loss, leaks, or other infrastructure problems, it was up to a team of engineers, contractors, and perhaps architects to investigate where the problem lay within the building's walls and to fix it - and that's only assuming anybody realized there was a problem in the first place. Slow leaks, mold contamination, faulty heat risers, and gaps in insulation can go undetected for years, compromising building residents' comfort and costing untold thousands in wasted energy and clean-up costs, and even developing into full-blown threats to building safety in the form of health and fire hazards. Read More
Expanded Owner Obligations
Effective August 2, 2004, a new lead-based paint regulation will force New York City property owners to change the way they deal with lead based paint in their properties. "Local Law 1 of 2004,"¯ overseen by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), broadens owner's responsibilities in dealing with lead-based paint issues. The new law dramatically changes and expands upon the owner's obligations set forth under "Local Law 38 of 1999,"¯ which was invalidated by the New York State Court of Appeals in a July 2003 decision. Read More
Considering an ESCO
Whether it's cash in hand or borrowed dollars, your properties are constantly faced with competing demands on scarce resources. These financial pressures can keep you from replacing an old, unreliable, repair-intensive, under-performing chiller or boiler plant. Read More
When is That Old Boiler Shot?
Like many questions, the answer is "it depends."¯ Many people think about a 20- or 30-year-old boiler the same way they think about a 10- or 15-year-old car: "It might need to be replaced soon, so I won't spend much money on it. I'll just wait and see what happens."¯ When a car makes it several more years, people start to think, "If it lasted this long, there is no telling how long I can keep it, so I'm going to take good care of it."¯ The same thing tends to happen with boilers if they make it to 40 or 50. The trick is knowing whether or not the boiler is likely to keep working for years and years. Read More
Fumes and Formaldehyde
Everyone knows the air in New York isn't the best stuff in the world to breathe. But what most people don't know is that the indoor environment is often more polluted and toxic than the world outdoors. In fact, a recent EPA study found that the indoor concentrations of 20 toxic compounds can be as much as 200 times higher compared to the relatively pristine urban outdoors. So let's start with a basic - and, hopefully, obvious - principle: If it's poisonous, carcinogenic, triggers asthma, or wreaks havoc on your nervous system, you probably don't want it in your building. Seems like common sense, right? And yet most of the products we use to build and maintain our buildings are portable Superfund sites, making their way Trojan Horse-like, into our common and living spaces. The good news for building owners and managers is that once you know what to look for, keeping the toxins out is a relatively easy thing to do. Read More
Your Eyes on the World
While environmental laws have improved air quality, grit, grime and grunge continue to mask the windows of most New Yorkers. This aesthetic blur can change a tenant's disposition as well as alter how a building is perceived by a passerby's knowing glance. Read More
Comfortable in Any Temperature
Efficiently heating and cooling residential buildings in New York City is a challenge. Decades ago, energy conservation and comfort simply were not the issues that they are today. What may be seen as a hardship today, (i.e., lack of air conditioning), wasn't even considered forty and fifty years ago. Today, relatively small temperature fluctuations are considered a problem needing attention. Less technology, fewer creature comfort concerns and lower energy costs then seemingly contributed to a variety of building and HVAC design practices, which are causing problems for building managers and occupants now. While there have been many advances and improvements in HVAC equipment performance and controls, and good reasons in terms of comfort and energy savings to upgrade to newer technology, dealing with the disruption of implementing equipment retrofits is a major consideration. This consideration often outweighs all other concerns. Programmable thermostats will yield immediate financial returns while reducing heating/cooling costs and increasing residents' comfort. Read More
The "Secret" of Interior Windows
Installing an interior window system can be like music to the ears of a typical shareholder or unit owner living in the city that never sleeps. The annoying inherent noises of the city - street, bus and truck traffic, sirens, car alarms, jack hammers and the like - have either been eliminated or significantly reduced from penetrating the sleeping, living and working environments - just by using the right type of window. Read More
Some Do's and Don'ts for AC Maintenance
In order to keep your air conditioning unit running efficiently, here are some tips to keep its maintenance in tip-top shape. Read More
Keeping Your Cool
I'm often asked what a person can do to keep their air conditioning unit working properly. AC units are complicated pieces of machinery, but there are many things a homeowner can do to keep their unit running and avoid making expensive service calls. Read More
Renovations Without Headaches
Construction projects can certainly be traumatic but the difficulties inherent in residential renovation projects could be substantially minimized with professional oversight from a construction management firm. Read More
Pick It Up, Pack It Up, Put It Away
In a city where living and business space alike are hard to come by, wildly expensive, and constantly needing to be revamped, the question of where tenants should store their belongings begs to be asked. No one wants to give up livable space for storage closets, so creative alternatives are necessary to maximize usable dwelling areas while at the same time providing storage that's safe, clean and convenient for all residents. The placement of these areas can range from basements to in-unit facilities; it's up to residents and boards to decide which kind is right for their particular building. Read More
