The co-op and condo industry quantified $5,859 in annual cost increases. Here is what its proposed remedies leave out.

The Council of New York Cooperatives & Condominiums surveyed more than 1,200 buildings and found that the average co-op or condo household paid $5,859 more per year in 2024 than in 2019. The numbers are credible, the methodology is named, and the cost stack they document is real. The gap is in what the group proposed to do about it.

What 1,200 buildings found.

CNYC's Keep Our Homes Affordable analysis draws on its membership of more than 1,200 co-op and condo buildings across New York City. The headline figure is $5,859 per household per year in new costs since 2019. Insurance accounts for the largest share: premiums more than doubled over that window. Umbrella coverage, which once cost roughly $3,000 for $100 million in protection, now costs around $25,000 for $25 million, an eight-fold cost increase for one-quarter of the coverage. Fuel and utility costs rose 33 percent. Property taxes rose by at least 20 percent.

Local Law 97 adds a separate compliance layer. CNYC estimates that meeting the law's carbon caps will cost between $12,390 and $90,397 per household, depending on building size and the systems currently installed. The report cites a specific building where annual insurance costs nearly tripled, from $50,000 to $130,000. At 100 units, that difference is $800 per unit per year before any other cost increase appears. These are not illustrative figures; they are the kind of building-level data that is difficult to aggregate across New York City's 15,000-plus condo and co-op buildings, and CNYC's survey is one of the few sources that attempts to do it.

CNYC is not a new organization. It has operated since 1975 and represents board chairs, building staff, and managing agents across the five boroughs. Its cost data carries the credibility of a trade group with direct access to building budgets. When the industry says costs have risen by $5,859 per household, that figure is worth taking seriously.

The proposals CNYC brought to the Mamdani administration.

CNYC presented its recommendations to Mayor Mamdani's administration in August 2026 under the Keep Our Homes Affordable framework. The proposals center on Local Law 97 compliance costs and operational cost reduction:

• Cap Local Law 97 penalties at their 2034 level rather than allowing them to escalate through 2050.
• Allow buildings to redirect penalty dollars toward electrification and efficiency upgrades directly, rather than paying them as fines with no connection to building improvement.
• Bundle compliance planning, financing, and installation into a single coordinated process to reduce contractor overhead and coordination costs.
• Create a unified portal consolidating reporting requirements for overlapping local laws, including Local Laws 84, 87, 88, 97, and 126.
• Expand NYC Accelerator's free concierge services to reach more buildings undertaking energy upgrade projects.

Each proposal targets the cost of complying with energy mandates. None addresses how compliance spending is managed, who manages it, or what accountability that person owes to the unit owners whose money funds the work.

Three accountability measures not in the proposals.

Three categories of reform are absent from CNYC's list. Each has a pending bill, a documented legislative history, and a structural connection to the cost problem CNYC's data describes.

Senate Bill S.71, the managing agent licensure bill sponsored by Senator Kavanagh, would require the person managing a building's budget, vendor relationships, and compliance programs to register with the Department of State and obtain certification from an approved organization. The bill has not received a committee hearing in ten consecutive legislative sessions. A barber needs a New York state license. A cosmetologist needs one. The managing agent selecting the vendors, approving the contracts, and executing the compliance filings that appear in CNYC's cost data needs none.

Senate Bill S7600 and Assembly Bill A8945 would require condo and co-op buildings to commission 30-year capital reserve studies prepared by credentialed specialists and file them with the Attorney General. A building with an underfunded reserve has fewer resources when an insurance spike or a Local Law 97 compliance deadline arrives at the same time. New York imposes no ongoing reserve study requirement on existing buildings. Neither S7600 nor A8945 received a floor vote before Albany adjourned on June 5, 2026. The Albany adjournment post documents the full list of bills that did not advance.

New York City Council Intro 0774-2026, the Fair Residential Cooperative Disclosure Law, would require co-op boards to provide rejected applicants a written explanation within five days. More than 7,000 co-op buildings and roughly 300,000 units in New York City are covered by boards that currently need not explain a rejection. The accountability gap is not limited to application denials: a board that has no disclosure obligation faces no structural pressure to explain vendor selections, contract approvals, or reserve fund decisions either.

Why absent accountability connects to present cost.

CNYC's data is consistent with what happens when accountability mechanisms are absent. The tendency for a building's compliance work to route through contractors with existing relationships to the managing agent operates most easily where no licensure threshold exists and no independent reserve review is required. The $5,859-per-household figure reflects real spending. It does not, by itself, separate spending on safety outcomes from spending on the markup structure that an unregulated vendor market can sustain without challenge.

New York Business Corporation Law §624 and Real Property Law §339-w give co-op shareholders and condo unit owners the right to inspect their building's financial records. No state agency can compel compliance if the board refuses. The only enforcement path is a court proceeding brought by the owner at their own expense. The post on what NYC condo and co-op owners can legally demand from the board walks through what that means in practice.

The same structural gap runs through the managing agent relationship. The state has no mechanism to revoke a credential that does not exist. It has no audit trail requirement that an unlicensed agent must maintain. When a building's insurance cost triples and the board asks the managing agent how the vendor was selected and whether competitive bids were obtained, the agent's obligation to answer is defined by the management contract, not by any regulatory standard. The business judgment rule post traces how New York law leaves boards insulated from owner challenge and agents insulated from boards.

The two tracks are not alternatives to each other.

The reforms CNYC proposes and the accountability measures it does not propose are not mutually exclusive. A building could benefit from a capped Local Law 97 penalty schedule and a licensed managing agent at the same time. A unified compliance portal and a mandatory reserve study can coexist in the same legislative session. Reducing the compliance cost burden does not prevent also requiring that the person executing compliance meet a licensure standard.

The 2025-2026 Albany session closed on June 5, 2026, with S.71, S7600, A8945, S5089 (the condo owner's bill of rights, which passed the Senate 60-0-2), and S7745 (the co-op ombudsperson bill) all in committee without a floor vote. The post on ten condo reform bills that did not advance tracks the decade-long committee record. The cost relief track and the accountability track have different legislative histories. Only one of them has been proposed for ten or more consecutive sessions without a committee hearing.

Bottom line.

CNYC's Keep Our Homes Affordable analysis is the most detailed industry-sourced accounting of what the regulatory cost stack has cost the average NYC co-op or condo household: $5,859 per year since 2019, with insurance and Local Law 97 compliance as the primary drivers. The proposals the group brought to the Mamdani administration target those compliance costs. Three accountability measures with active pending bills are not among them: managing agent licensure, mandatory reserve studies, and co-op board rejection disclosure. The cost data and the accountability gap are not separate problems, and the proposals that reach the administration's desk will address only one of them unless the other is added to the list.

Primary sources

CNYC Keep Our Homes Affordable — cost analysis of 1,200+ buildings; LL97 compliance estimates; affordability recommendations to the Mamdani administration (August 2026)
NY Senate S.71 (Kavanagh) — managing agent registration and certification bill; in committee; no hearing in ten sessions
NY Senate S7600 / NY Assembly A8945 — mandatory 30-year capital reserve study bills; referred to committee; no floor vote before June 5, 2026 adjournment
NY Senate S5089 — condo owner's bill of rights; passed Senate 60-0-2; no Assembly floor vote
NY Senate S7745 — cooperative and condominium ombudsperson program; in committee
NYC Council Int 0774-2026 — Fair Residential Cooperative Disclosure Law; pending in committee
NY Business Corporation Law §624 — co-op shareholder financial records inspection right
NY Real Property Law §339-w — condo unit owner financial records inspection right

Companion resources: The NYC local law extraction stack: every mandate, every dollar · S.71: the managing agent licensure bill nobody's talking about · When Albany adjourned in June, four co-op reform bills had no vote · NY's condo ombudsman bill did not advance for the second consecutive session · New York's condo-reform record: what stalled, and what passed · Albany backed off the 2030 climate target. NYC's LL97 penalty schedule is unchanged. · Write to your state representative