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Energy Conservation
Conservation Tips
The buzz about green buildings and energy conservation is so loud you just can't shut your ears to it. And why should you? We are being inundated with information on how to make our buildings and our lives greener. Even if your building can't afford an entire 'green' makeover, there are easy, cost-effective strategies that both boards and residents can implement to save money and energy. Read More
Preparing Buildings for Winter
Although it may seem like the dog days of summer were just upon us, it's not too early to start thinking about winter. The cold months are right around the corner, and although last winter might seem like a distant memory, it's time to begin preparing for this winter season. Taking the time to address winterization now will go a long way in making sure your co-op or condo is ready to face the elements. Read More
Breaking Down the Process
The phrase "Reduce, reuse, recycle" has become something of a mantra in our times—though you still occasionally see a glass bottle or plastic container just stuffed in the trash, more and more people from all walks of life are becoming more environmentally-conscientious. For the city's residential co-op and condo communities, recycling has become the rule rather than the exception. Read More
The Dump is Dead--Now What?
On March 22, 2001, after 53 years of accepting New York City’s trash, Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill received its final shipment. Fresh Kills was originally intended to serve as a temporary storage site, but over 400,000 garbage barges later, it now stretches as far as four Central Parks and towers as high as the Statue of Liberty. Read More
One Man's Trash...Is Still Trash
Two hundred years ago, a visitor to New York City remarked that the teeming sprawl was a "nasal disaster, where some streets smell like bad eggs dissolved in ammonia."¯ Read More
A Chat with the Chief Executive
When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in January of 2002, he inherited a city still reeling from the September 11th terror attacks—and had to fill the not-insignificant shoes of outgoing mayor Rudy Giuliani. Since then, Mayor Bloomberg has shifted City Hall’s focus to issues like housing and education, while still overseeing the reconstruction in Lower Manhattan. It’s a tall order—and Mayor Bloomberg took time recently to answer some direct questions from The Cooperator about his administration and his vision for the future of the city. Read More
Where Does the Garbage Go?
Think about this the next time you throw that banana peel, plastic packaging and junk mail away: residents of New York City and its surrounding boroughs are responsible for generating 12,000 tons (that’s right…tons!) of garbage each day. Picking up this mammoth daily load are 2,230 collection trucks. The collected waste is then moved to transfer facilities and carted off to landfills—located in various surrounding states—which are now nearly all at capacity. Prior to cutting back recycling services, it has been reported that New York spent almost $1 billion per year on trash and recyclables collection. Read More
Reducing High Energy Costs
Energy usage and cost savings are on everybody’s mind these days— especially those of us in charge of running our buildings, keeping them both comfortable and financially solvent. Each building community is unique, and boards and managers must come up with energy-saving programs that are the best possible fit for their residents, their administration, and their budget. Here are three examples of how different building managers and boards have met the challenges posed by today’s high energy costs. Read More
Conducting Energy Audits
While there are a number of issues that make it to the top of the list of building managers’ and board members’ fiscal worries each year, the standout issue in recent years is energy costs. In light of rising fuel prices and increased demand for energy, it’s the fiduciary duty of all co-op and condo administrators to examine what cost-saving options are out there to reduce utility costs. Read More
Good Gadgets
You don’t need to go too far back to be reminded about energy conservation. Remember the stifling triple-digit heat in August? The power outages in Queens due to the strain on the distribution grids? And the annual call by public officials urging people to conserve electricity as summer power usage exceeded the overall record? Read More
A Win-Win Situation
It’s never easy to get people to do what’s good for them. No one wants to exercise or take cough syrup or lay off the T-bone steaks, even if they know life will be better when they do. For years, it’s been the same way with energy conservation. These days, though, with oil and gas prices soaring and headlines filled with talk of global warming, it appears the time has come at last to embrace the grown-up thing and do what’s good for us. Read More
Maximizing the Market
Energy is a singularly important and pressing issue. Even so, addressing this issue has not yet risen to the top of the list for many apartment managers and co-op boards. For large-scale apartment managers, the mandate to limit exposure to energy cost risk may be the only way that this vital issue is even starting to assume the characteristics of “critical mass.” Beyond limiting risk, few realize that most buildings themselves are untapped sources of potential energy-based revenues. Read More
Adding Value to Your Building
Co-op and condo owners and managers continue to face operations and maintenance issues that directly affect ownership costs and property marketability. Among these are: building modernization, equipment and building component repairs and replacement, controls utilization or lack of adequate controls, and, of course, wrestling with ever rising and ever volatile utility bills. Read More
Taking Out the Trash
It’s your twice-a-year, floor-to-rafters marathon house-cleaning session. You’ve recycled all your newspapers, taken your soda bottles back to the market and disposed of that fern that’s been gone for a few weeks now. Cleaning is nearly done, except for that small pile of “what do I do with those?” materials in the corner. Read More
The Heat of the Matter
The importance of a boiler to a building can’t be measured. It provides heat and circulation to its residents and, as anyone who has lived through the harsh New York winter in the past few years can tell you, that’s mighty important. So why is it that some people don’t even think about the boiler until there’s a problem? Read More
Green Buildings
With the rise of environmentalism and recycling, and the renewed emphasis on energy efficiency since the 1970s energy crisis, has come the idea of the “green building,” which are buildings that actively conserve energy. The idea first took hold in the commercial and institutional sectors, but is now gaining strength in the residential sector, including multi-family housing. Read More
The Power of Green
For the past couple of decades, interest in the environment and "greening" of residential buildings has been creeping into our daily lexicon; nowadays, the theories have become practice, and renewable or "green" power is now more accessible than ever before. With planning and guidance, just about any building can inject a little environmentally friendly, money-saving green into its daily operations. Read More
Working Together
Among the thousands of multifamily buildings in the metro New York area, it is a consistent lack of intelligent maintenance practices that prevent buildings from attaining high performance and energy efficiency. Read More
Green Building Saves the Green
The environmental benefits of "green"¯ buildings have never been questioned. The reduced intake of resources and the reduced output of waste accomplished through environmentally sensitive building reduce the negative environment impact of a building. Although the environmental benefits of green buildings are clear, how to afford a more environmentally sustainable living environment is not. Cost is a frequent excuse against building green. While it is true that the initial cost of green building can be more - an extra $3 to $5 per square foot, by some estimates - the life cycle cost of a green building is significantly less. Read More
Nipping Blackouts in the Bud
To conserve power to help avoid a blackout, the power industry recommends: Read More
Assisted Multifamily Program
Eligible co-op boards facing skyrocketing maintenance charges due to rising energy costs can seek assistance from the New York Energy Smart Assisted Multifamily Program (AMP), administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Read More
Renewable Energy
In New York City, electricity is a lot like Chinese food. It's ubiquitous, available for delivery right to your home, and is made with lots and lots of oil. But unlike a good Chinese restaurant, Con Edison, the electricity provider for almost all of New York City, has a menu with only one choice. And until recently, if you didn't like that choice, well that was just too bad. Theirs was the only gig in town. But the days of one-electron-fits-all have come to an end. Now anyone who thinks that their electricity should come from sources that don't pollute, don't come from the Middle East, don't contribute to climate change, and don't double as weapons of mass destruction, can pick up the phone and order a new utility product called "Green Power."¯ Read More
Measuring the Kilowatts
Building owners, managers and even superintendents are always on the lookout for ways to trim their operating budget's bottom line. Electricity and fuel costs continue to climb year after year and identifying cost savings in this area can become more and more difficult. One way to analyze your building's expenses is to conduct an energy audit, but getting one isn't as simple as it seems. Read More
Conserving Your Profits
The billing system used by New York City's Water Board - an autonomous, seven-member panel appointed by the mayor to set rates for the city's water and sewer services - has long been grounds for heated debate. As of the late 1980s, the city was one of the last urban areas to still charge customers a flat rate charge for water used. However, studies showed that New York City's per capita water consumption was the highest among the nation's urban areas. Read More
Keeping It Real
When people are charged for energy based on how much they use individually, good habits tend to follow. When you pay for electricity based on your usage, you're more likely to make sure that the lights are turned off when you leave a room, that you wash laundry in larger loads, and limit your air conditioning use even in the dog days of summer. Read More
When the Lights Go Out
It began last August with noncompliance with energy regulations in Ohio, and within hours, much of the Eastern Seaboard - including the city that never sleeps - came to a standstill. Although some areas of the city recovered power faster than others after the blackout of 2003, the question remains: Will it happen again? What has been done to prevent it? And most importantly, what can a building do to keep residents safe in the event of a blackout? Read More
Paper or Plastic
Recycling is good for the environment - everyone knows that. But it can be a pain keeping track of the changes - one year it doesn't include glass or plastics, the next, glass and plastics are back; one year, you recycle newspapers, the next, you recycle "mixed papers"¯ as well. And if this is confusing to the ordinary New York cooperator or condo owner, who has to take piles of newspapers and magazines down to the basement, it's doubly challenging for board members and building managers. Read More
Green Corner: Understanding Lighting
There's nothing worse than bad lighting. Take an otherwise beautiful room and illuminate it with the wrong kind of light - whether too dim, too bright, too hot, too cold, too pale, or too bleak - and the mood, feeling, and livability of the space is ruined. And the worst of the bad-lighting culprits are the cold, bleak, buzzing, latter-generation fluorescents that make you feel like you're trapped in some Soviet-era mental hospital, or the Matrix, or some other world that has forgotten its love for humanity. Read More
Bracing for the Cold
Last winter's frigid temperatures shocked many city dwellers accustomed to the mild temperatures that have been the new norm in New York for several years. New Yorkers donned down coats, insulated boots, and thermal underwear, and millions watched solemnly as their heating bills soared. Read More
Keep the Juices Flowing
When the co-op board of 31 Jane Street in New York City decided to upgrade their building's windows, the directors decided to purchase window glass that came with an Energy Star rating. "Initially we were going to pay for the window project outright,"¯ says Toni Kamins, Jane Street resident and board president, "but getting Energy Star window glass enabled us to get a loan for the project with interest subsidized by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Getting an subsidized loan saved us thousands of dollars in interest."¯ Read More
Winterizing Your Building
Winter is the harshest season when it comes to wear-and-tear on residential buildings. Not only does ice collect in cracks and spaces between bricks and masonry, contributing to faƧade deterioration, but salt also erodes surfaces, boilers and steam pipes work overtime, and more hours of darkness mean higher electrical and gas bills. Read More
Lessons From the Blackout of 2003
On Thursday, August 14, 2003, New York City experienced a blackout of major proportions, part of an event that affected eight states and part of Canada as well. The Cooperative Coalition to Prevent Blackouts (CCPB), and the Federation of New York Housing Cooperatives and Condominiums (FNYHC) - one of the coalition's founding members - has been warning the various state and federal agencies for years that an event such as this was bound to happen. The mystery of why it happened and who is to blame is still under investigation, but it appears a single mishap paralyzed the Northeast, plunging more than 50 million people into darkness, stranding residents and commuters, shutting down public transportation, and costing an estimated billions of dollars in lost business and spoiled provisions. Read More
Squeeze Your Own Juice
During the recent citywide blackout, most everyone found themselves somewhere in the dark, and the city's co-ops and condos were no exception. The 24-hour crisis left nearly everyone in New York's five boroughs (and much of the Northeast) asking this question: Where were you when the lights went out? For most of us, the answer was simple: stuck. But if your building had a co-generation system, the answer might have been, "I was in my air-conditioned living room, drinking iced tea and watching news coverage of the blackout on television."¯ Buildings with partial or full co-generation systems at least had some chance of providing energy to their residents throughout the crisis. And if your building decides to turn to co-generation, perhaps you won't be left in the dark if there's ever a sequel to Blackout 2003. Read More
