Nobody Is Checking

A letter to anyone who owns, or is about to buy, an apartment in New York.

Three sentences

Somewhere in your building’s offering plan — the document that created your condominium or cooperative, the one nobody reads — are three sentences that look like boilerplate.

“The Board is not required to establish and maintain an adequate reserve fund…”

“No representation or warranty is made that the Working Capital Fund or the Replacement Reserve Fund will be, or is intended to be, adequate…”

“Neither the Department of Law nor any other government agency has passed upon the adequacy…”

— quoted verbatim from a New York offering plan, sent to us by the owner who read it

We are not naming the building, and we make no claim about it. Language of this kind is standard across New York offering plans, and the point of this letter is that it is standard, not that it is unusual.

They are not boilerplate. They are the most accurate description of your legal position that exists anywhere in the document, and every one of them is true.

This letter is about what they mean, what they cost, and why they have been true for decades.

What they actually say

The first sentence says your board has no legal duty to keep money aside for the roof.

New York imposes no minimum reserve on a condominium or cooperative and no continuing obligation on a board to maintain one. A board that funds nothing, for thirty years, is complying with the law.

There is one partial exception, and it is worth knowing whether it applies to you. If your building was converted from rentals in New York City, Local Law 70 of 1982 required the sponsor — the party that did the conversion — to fund a reserve of 3% of the total price and hand it to the board within thirty days of the first closing. All of that is verified against the Attorney General’s own guidance to sponsors, linked in the source table below. HPD oversees it. Violations carry civil and criminal penalties.

But that 3% is a one-time payment by someone who has since left, calculated per the verified Attorney General guidance in the source table below, as a percentage of a sale price rather than as an estimate of what your building will need. And if your building is new construction, it never applied at all.

The second sentence is doing quiet work. Plans often present a “working capital fund” and a “reserve fund” near each other, and the two sound interchangeable. They are not. The Attorney General’s own guidance to sponsors says so in one line:

“A working capital fund, which may be established by a sponsor, is not a reserve fund.”

Working capital pays this year’s bills. A reserve pays for the elevator. If your plan leans on a working capital figure, you should know which one you are looking at.

The third sentence is the one that matters most, and it is the one people misread.

Buyers see that an offering plan was “filed with the Attorney General” and reasonably assume somebody reviewed it. Nobody did. The regulation governing these plans requires the cover to say so, in capital letters:

“FILING WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF LAW DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE DEPARTMENT OR ANY OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCY HAS APPROVED THIS.”

New York’s law here is a disclosure statute, not an approval statute. The state’s position is that a sponsor must tell you certain things. It takes no position on whether what you were told adds up to a building that can pay for itself.

So: is the reserve adequate? Nobody knows. Not because it is secret — because nobody is assigned to look.

Why “adequate” is an empty word

Here is the part that took us a long time to see, and it changes how you should read all three sentences.

“Adequate” has no definition in New York law. There is no standard, no formula, no benchmark, no professional study anyone is required to commission. So when a sponsor writes that no representation is made as to adequacy, the sponsor is not dodging. There is nothing to represent. The word has no referent.

Florida requires a structural reserve study. California requires one every three years. Nevada requires one and registers the professionals who perform them. New York requires none.

Which means the honest translation of all three sentences is a single sentence:

No one has estimated what your building will need, no one is required to, and no one will check.

Where it lands

On you, and usually all at once.

The way this failure surfaces is a special assessment: a bill, from your own board, for your share of a repair that has to happen now. There is no legal cap on it. The board can assess whatever the work costs.

Facade work is the common trigger, because New York City requires buildings over six stories to have their exterior walls examined at least every five years and unsafe conditions corrected within thirty days of the report. That is a good law. It is also a bill that arrives on a schedule, in a building that was never required to save for it.

We are not going to give you an average, because there isn’t an honest one: buildings differ too much and no agency publishes the distribution. What we can tell you is the shape of the thing: facade projects commonly run from the low hundreds of thousands into the millions, and the arithmetic that reaches you is simply the project cost, minus whatever is in reserve, divided by common interest.

When the reserve is near zero, the divisor is doing all the work.

What it costs

We are going to be careful here, because most numbers you will see attached to this problem are made up.

We cannot tell you the total cost of New York’s missing guardrails. Nobody can. It is not measured, because measuring it would require the registry, the reserve studies, and the reporting that do not exist. The absence of the number is itself a symptom.

What we can give you are verified figures that show the scale of the machinery already pointed at these buildings:

$659 million, verified in the City Comptroller’s audit of October 2024. What New York City granted in co-op and condominium tax abatements in fiscal year 2023: $497.1 million to 253,686 co-op units, $161.9 million to 56,437 condo units. That is money the city already sends your building every year, through a channel that already exists.

$6,465,892. What the city’s own Comptroller found had gone to 720 ineligible units between 2019 and 2024. The cause, per the audit: a placeholder eligibility code labelled “XY”, created during a 2019 system migration, that “allowed certain eligibility checks to be bypassed.” It was removed in May 2024, five years later.

Hold those two numbers next to each other, because together they say something precise. The city is not indifferent to your building. It sends it two-thirds of a billion dollars a year. It just does not have a system that reliably knows which buildings those are, and it went five years without noticing a code that turned the checks off.

That is not a story about money. It is a story about nobody being assigned to look, which is the same story as the three sentences in your offering plan.

16,794 and roughly 800. Bills introduced in the New York Legislature in the 2025 session, and bills that reached the Governor: about 4.8%. That is from a published session summary, cited and linked in the source table below; we have not reconciled it against the Legislature’s own totals. Any fix to any of this has to survive that.

Why there are no guardrails

This is the part you are owed a straight answer on, and the straight answer is not a conspiracy. It is five structural facts, each of which is boring on its own.

1. You are not a tenant, and you are not a landlord.

New York housing law is built around that binary, and it is built well. Tenants have rent regulation, housing court, a right to counsel in eviction proceedings, and an organized advocacy infrastructure decades old. Landlords are a regulated industry with licensing, registration, and enforcement pointed at them.

You are neither. You own your home and you are governed by a board. Nearly every protective mechanism in New York housing law is addressed to a category you are not in.

2. Your board is both the regulated party and the victim.

This is the strangest feature of the problem and the one that explains the most.

In every other consumer-protection context, there is an industry on one side and the public on the other. Here, the entity that would be regulated — the board — is composed of your neighbours, serving without pay, who are also the people being harmed by the absence of rules.

So the constituency that should be demanding oversight is the same constituency that would have to comply with it. A board member reading a proposal for mandatory reserve studies sees both a protection and a chore. That ambivalence is structural, and it is why owner-side pressure for governance rules has always been weaker than the underlying problem.

3. No agency has jurisdiction after the sponsor leaves.

The Attorney General’s Real Estate Finance Bureau reviews the offering plan, as a filing, not on the merits. Once the sponsor transitions control to a resident board, no state agency has continuing jurisdiction over how the building is governed.

There is no regulator to complain to because there is no regulator.

4. Bills with a price tag die in a committee that never debates them.

An ombudsperson for co-op and condo owners has been proposed in New York in nine consecutive sessions since 2009. Every version died in the Finance committee.

Not Housing. Not Judiciary. Finance.

That is not a policy defeat — it is a bill that was never argued about on its merits. It is also fixable, which is why it is worth knowing.

5. Until this year, nobody was organized.

More than a million New Yorkers live in co-ops and condos. Until 2026, they had no unified advocacy organization, and as of July 2026 they still have no caucus in the City Council, which has nine.

Diffuse costs spread across a million households do not organize themselves. Concentrated interests do. That is not a moral observation about anyone; it is the ordinary arithmetic of who shows up.

No caucus for a million people

The New York City Council has nine official caucuses: Animal Welfare, Black Latino and Asian, Common-Sense, Irish, Italian, Jewish, LGBTQIA, Progressive, and Women’s.

None is for homeowners.

New York City has roughly 779,191 registered co-op and condominium homes across 15,108 buildings, which is our own count from the city’s registration data, not an official figure. Somewhere over a million people live in them. They are the single largest form of homeownership in the city and they have no organized bloc inside the body that writes the local laws they pay for.

In March 2026 a trade publication reported that Council members were forming one. We believed that report. We built outreach around it. On July 6, 2026, the office of Council Member Julie Won — named in that report as an anticipated member — wrote back to correct us:

“Just to clarify, the Real Deal’s article reported unconfirmed information. Unfortunately, there is no co-op/condo caucus at the City Council.”

— Neily Vera Martinez, Deputy Chief of Staff, Office of Council Member Julie Won

We were wrong, in public, and the correction came from the office of the member the article named. We are including it here rather than quietly deleting it, because the fact that a caucus was reported into existence and then had to be reported back out of it tells you something about how thin the ground is.

There is still no caucus.

Where does the money go

This is the question people ask when they hear all this, and it deserves a precise answer rather than an insinuation.

Nobody is stealing the $659 million verified in the Comptroller’s audit above. The abatement goes to owners, to you. The city is not withholding a fund that belongs to your building. If you are looking for a villain holding a bag, there isn’t one, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What the absence of rules produces is not a transfer. It is discretion without a record. And discretion without a record has value — not to a conspiracy, but to whoever happens to hold it.

Concretely, and each of these is a gap we can point at in current law:

Nobody has to tell you who pays them. New York requires no disclosure by a managing agent or a board member of compensation received from a vendor the building hires. California requires a version of it. New York requires none. So if the party choosing your building’s insurance broker, fuel supplier, or facade contractor is being paid by that vendor, there is no document in which that has to appear.

Nobody has to itemize what they bill you. There is no cap on the legal fees added to a common-charge arrears and no requirement that they be itemized. A small arrears can become a large judgment through charges nobody is required to break out.

Nobody has to bid the work. No statute requires competitive bidding for association contracts, and no statute requires the bid file to be kept or shown to owners. Where there is no record of the alternatives, there is nothing to compare the chosen vendor against.

Delay is free for whoever holds the records. The law says you may examine the books. It does not say what happens if the board declines. Because there is no fee-shifting, asserting the right costs more than the right is worth, so the rational move is to drop it, and everyone involved knows that.

Put those four together and the answer to “where does the money go” is this: it goes wherever the person with the discretion sends it, and no instrument exists that would show you. That is a smaller and more boring claim than a conspiracy. It is also worse, because a conspiracy can be prosecuted and this cannot.

”But there are local laws”

There is a fair objection to everything above, and it deserves to be met head on: New York City legislates this space constantly. Local Law 11 and its successor, the Facade Inspection Safety Program. Local Law 97 on emissions. Local Law 152 on gas piping. Local Law 87 on energy audits. These are real laws with real deadlines, and they land on your building whether or not Albany ever acts.

So the gap is filled. Isn’t it?

Look at how the instruments are actually built. We read both of these end to end, in the city’s own published text, and the quotations below are verbatim.

Local Law 97 of 2019, § 28-320.6 — “Penalties.” Every figure in this paragraph is verified against the source linked in the table below. An owner over the emissions limit “shall be liable for a civil penalty of not more than an amount equal to the difference between the building emissions limit for such year and the reported building emissions for such year, multiplied by $268.” Failure to file the annual report: $0.50 per square foot of gross floor area, per month (§ 28-320.6.2). A knowing false statement: up to $500,000 and a misdemeanor (§ 28-320.6.3). Penalties are recovered before the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (§ 28-320.6.4).

The Facade Inspection Safety Program, 1 RCNY § 103-04(d). Every figure here is verified against the source linked below. Failure to file the required report: $5,000 per year. Late filing: an additional $1,000 per month until an acceptable report is filed. Failure to correct an unsafe condition: $1,000 per month, plus a sidewalk-shed charge that escalates from $10 to $20 to $30 to $40 per linear foot of shed, per month, the longer the shed stays up. A condition flagged as needing repair in one cycle and filed as unsafe in the next: $2,000. All figures quoted from the Department of Buildings’ own rule.

Now notice three things that are not in either law.

There is no fund to help anyone comply. We searched the full text of Local Law 97 for the word “fund.” It appears once, in an exemption for housing development fund companies. The law creates a penalty and creates no instrument that returns anything to the buildings paying it.

Nobody is required to inspect your building at public expense. Under the facade rule, the inspection is performed by a Qualified Exterior Wall Inspector “retained by the owner of the building” (§ 103-04(c)(2)(ii)). You pay for the inspection. You pay for the report. You pay for the shed. If the report is late, you pay the fine. The city’s role in the sequence is to receive the filing and to charge for its absence.

No agency publishes whether the condition got fixed. Filings are tracked. Penalties are tracked. We are not aware of any published city measure of what share of unsafe facade conditions were actually remediated, or what share of covered buildings came under their emissions limit, as opposed to paid. If such a measure exists, we will link it here and say so.

And the deadlines move. Local Law 97 alone contains an extension of time to file (§ 28-320.3.7.1), a discretionary adjustment of the emissions limit itself (§ 28-320.7), a second adjustment for 2024–2029 (§ 28-320.8), and an extension of that adjustment’s effective period (§ 28-320.8.1.1). The facade rule lets the Commissioner grant an extension of time to complete repairs.

We are not saying anyone set out to raise money. We are describing what the instrument does when you read it. When the deadline can move and the penalty schedule cannot, the part of the law that operates most reliably is the schedule. Compliance is discretionary and negotiable at the margins. The charge is automatic. Over a long enough period, the thing a law does dependably becomes the thing it is for — not because anyone chose that, but because that is the part that keeps running.

What this looks like somewhere else

The comparison that matters is not whether other states fine people. They do. It is what happens to the money and whether anything comes back.

Nevada wrote the distinction into the statute. NRS 116.630 creates an Account for Common-Interest Communities, funded by fees paid by associations, and directs that the money “must be used solely to defray: (a) The costs and expenses of the Commission and the Office of the Ombudsman; (b) … the costs and expenses of subsidizing proceedings for mediation, arbitration” and a state dispute-resolution program. Then subsection 3 does something New York has no equivalent for: it sends fines and penalties somewhere else — to the State General Fund — and requires the Commission to present a claim to the State Board of Examiners if it needs money back for an investigation. Nevada’s statute separates the money that buys owners a service from the money raised by punishing them, and it does so in the operative text rather than by practice. Quoted from the Nevada Legislature’s published text of the chapter.

Florida charges a fee and delivers a division. Under Fla. Stat. § 718.501, every condominium association operating more than two units pays the state “an annual fee in the amount of $4 for each residential unit,” deposited in a trust fund, quoted from the Florida Senate’s published statute, linked in the source table. What the fee buys is a Division that investigates owner complaints after the developer leaves.

Virginia charges a small filing fee and gives you a reviewer. Verified in the source table below. Under Va. Code § 54.1-2354.4, an owner who has exhausted the association’s complaint process may file a notice of final adverse decision — a complaint the association has already refused — with the Common Interest Community Ombudsman for a $25 filing fee, credited to a dedicated fund. Quoted from the Virginia code as published by the state, linked below. The Ombudsman’s office, established at § 54.1-2354.3, reviews it against the regulations and notifies the parties of a violation.

Three states. Three fee structures. In each one, the money an owner pays into the system buys that owner access to something: an ombudsman, an investigator, a subsidized mediation. New York City collects from co-op and condo buildings under a schedule of civil penalties and returns no equivalent service. There is no state ombudsman to route the money to, because the bill creating one has died in committee nine times.

The strongest case for doing it this way — and who each version of it serves

We think the argument on the other side is real, so here it is at full strength, with an honest note about who benefits if you accept it.

“A penalty is the cheapest enforcement instrument there is.” Inspecting every building with public inspectors would cost far more than fining the minority that fall out of compliance. Fines are self-targeting: they only reach people who missed something.

Who it serves: This is true, and it primarily serves the city’s budget. What it settles quietly is who pays for accuracy: the owner, every cycle, forever, whether or not anything is wrong.

“If the fine collects a lot, the law failed.” A penalty priced to change behavior is supposed to raise almost nothing. Revenue would be a symptom of non-compliance, not a goal.

Who it serves: This is the best argument of the four, and it serves the people who wrote the law. It is also a testable claim, and the test is not published. Without collections reported against remediation, the argument cannot be checked by anyone outside the agency. An argument that cannot be checked is a position, not a defense.

“The professionals who file know the building better than a city inspector would.” A qualified engineer retained for the job brings expertise a public inspection cadre would take a decade to build.

Who it serves: The professional firms that hold the filing franchise, and the city, which gets expertise without payroll. It is also the same structure this letter flags elsewhere: the person certifying the condition is paid by the party the certification is about.

“The extensions are mercy, not deferral.” A hard limit with no relief valve would bankrupt buildings that physically cannot retrofit on the schedule.

Who it serves: Also true, and it serves buildings that can afford consultants to prepare an adjustment application. A relief valve that must be applied for is available in proportion to a building’s ability to pay for the application.

None of these four requires anyone to be acting in bad faith. That is the point. A system can arrive at fine-first enforcement through four defensible decisions and still leave owners paying for inspections, paying for reports, paying for penalties, and receiving no independent certification, no published effectiveness measure, and nowhere to complain.

What would change it

Not repealing the local laws. The buildings genuinely do need to be safe, and the emissions targets are somebody else’s fight.

Three changes, none of which require a new mandate:

1. Publish the outcome, not the charge. Report annually what share of unsafe conditions were remediated and what share of covered buildings came under their limit, alongside what was collected. The data already exists inside the agencies.
2. Route the money to a service. Nevada’s statute is the template: fees fund an office that helps owners; fines go elsewhere. New York has no office to route to yet, which is an argument for building one, not against it.
3. Pay for independent verification of a sample. If the city will not fund every inspection, it can fund an audit of a random sample of filings, which is the only way anyone finds out whether owner-retained certification is producing accurate reports.

Every one of those is cheaper than the penalty revenue it would make legible.

What happens on the rare occasion somebody does check

There is one part of this system that does get audited, and it is worth looking at closely, because it is the closest thing to a controlled experiment we have.

The city’s co-op and condo tax abatement is administered by the Department of Finance. The Comptroller has audited that administration three times, and all three reports are published.

January 2016 (audit SR16-055A). The Comptroller found the Department of Finance had granted abatements to at least 1,249 ineligible properties — 3,471 improperly granted abatements across fiscal years 2013 through 2016, a revenue loss of at least $10,018,348. The largest single category was 1,049 properties where the abatement was not removed after the unit was sold to a corporation or an LLC. The report made twelve recommendations. The first was to remove the abatements from units that Finance’s own ACRIS records showed were owned by a corporation or an LLC.

June 2016 (follow-up SR16-120SL). Five months later the Comptroller went back to see whether it had been done. Finance had removed 920 of the 1,249, recovering about $3.2 million. 295 properties still held improper abatements, including 154 still owned by a corporation or LLC. The follow-up’s own conclusion: “This gain will continue as long as the property is owned by a corporation or LLC or the property is classified for non-residential use.”

October 2024 (audit FP24-056A). Eight years later, the Comptroller audited the same program again. It found 720 ineligible units receiving the abatement in fiscal 2023, of which 290 were owned by businesses — the same category the 2016 audit had told Finance to clear, and the 2016 follow-up had reported was not fully cleared. Estimated revenue loss across fiscal years 2019 through 2024: about $6.5 million. Finance agreed with most of the recommendations and declined to pursue recovery on some of the business-owned units, attributing those to processing errors.

We want to be careful about what this does and does not show. These are three audits with three different scopes and three different populations of units; we are not saying the 290 units found in 2024 are the same 154 left uncleared in 2016. What recurred is the category: a residential owner-occupancy benefit sitting on units owned by companies, identified, ordered removed, partially removed, and present again at the next look.

Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions.

The first is that auditing works. Somebody looked, found a specific number, named the mechanism, and $3.2 million came back within five months. That is what oversight produces when it exists.

The second is that it only happened three times in a decade, and only to the one part of this system that touches the city’s own revenue. The Department of Finance gets audited because the money is the city’s. Your building’s reserve fund, your building’s vendor contracts, and your building’s legal-fee charges are nobody’s revenue but yours. No agency audits those, and there is no report to link here, because none exists.

That is the asymmetry in one line: when the money at stake is the city’s, someone counts it every few years. When the money at stake is yours, the counting is optional and nobody has volunteered.

Who benefits from there being no ombudsman

Here the answer is sharper, because the arithmetic is available.

An ombudsperson for co-op and condo owners has been introduced in New York in nine consecutive sessions since 2009. Every version died in the Finance committee — not on the merits, not after a hearing, not on a vote anyone had to cast in public.

Now hold that next to what the thing would cost.

The current version proposes to fund the office with a $6 annual fee per residential unit, paid by owners, not by the city. The Comptroller’s audit tells us New York City’s abatement reaches 310,123 units (253,686 co-op, 56,437 condo). Six dollars against those units is about $1.86 million a year.

The same Comptroller audit tells us the city granted $659 million in abatements to those units in a single fiscal year.

An ombudsman would cost under three-tenths of one percent of what the city already sends these buildings, and owners would pay for it themselves.

(That arithmetic is ours: the $6 figure and the unit counts are from the sources listed below; the multiplication and the ratio are our own. The fee is proposed statewide while the abatement figure is New York City only, so treat the ratio as scale, not precision.)

So who benefits from its absence?

The honest answer is that almost nobody actively wants it blocked — and that is exactly the problem. Consider who could have carried it in any of those nine sessions:

• Tenant advocacy organizations have the expertise and the relationships. You are not their constituency.
• Real estate trade groups have the access. You are not their members either, and several of the rules would land on parties who are.
• Your own board would be the entity regulated. Volunteers rarely campaign to be supervised.
• Managing agents would face a license they could lose. There is no version of this that is neutral for them.
• The city and state score it as a cost line, in the one committee where nothing gets argued.
• The Attorney General has no continuing jurisdiction over your building once the sponsor leaves, so it is nobody’s file.

Every actor with the capacity to move it has a reason not to lead. The only group with an unambiguous interest — you — had no organization at all until March of this year.

That is the answer to “why has it stayed that way.” Not because someone is guarding it. Because for seventeen years, in a chamber that introduced 16,794 bills in a single session, nobody with standing made anyone vote on it.

The elephant

Put 2 and 5 together and you get the thing nobody says out loud.

The reason there are no guardrails is not that someone blocked them. It is that, for forty years, nobody asked for them — and the people best positioned to ask were structurally ambivalent about the answer.

Then, in 2026, that changed, and how it changed is the most interesting fact in this letter.

Co-ops and Condos United of NY launched on March 30, 2026 — an umbrella advocacy group for co-op and condominium homeowners, whose executive committee includes Stuart Saft of Holland & Knight, Geoffrey Mazel of Hankin & Mazel, Jane Menton as legislative director, and Michael Wolfe. It describes itself as speaking for roughly a million New Yorkers, and its stated aim is “a unified organization so that we can speak with one voice on the issues that matter most to our communities.”

After decades without one, owners have an organized voice. That is a genuinely good development and we say so without qualification.

And what it is organized around is cost.

Its stated focus is the affordability crisis, capital improvement costs, and unfunded mandates. Those are real and they are legitimate: the mandates landing on buildings in 2026 are expensive and were imposed without funding.

But notice what that focus does not include: no reserve study requirement, no minimum reserve, no standard of adequacy, no public record of whether a sponsor ever funded the reserve the law already requires.

That is the elephant. The first organized owner voice in New York is asking, reasonably, to be required to spend less, at the moment when the thing owners most need is one specific requirement more.

And it is not hypocrisy. It follows directly from fact 2. When the regulated party and the protected party are the same people, an organization representing them will naturally lead with relief from obligations rather than the creation of new ones. Every board member is feeling the cost of Local Law 97 this year. Almost none is feeling the cost of an unfunded reserve, because that bill has not arrived yet.

The mandates that hurt are visible. The absence that hurts is not.

What guardrails would actually look like

Not many. Not expensive. Mostly one idea repeated:

Require a study, and require the ratio to be printed. A credentialed estimate of what the building will need, and the reserve balance stated as a percentage of it. The state certifies nothing and sets no floor. It requires one number to be shown next to another, which is all it takes for “adequate” to stop being an empty word.

Publish whether the sponsor paid. For converted buildings, the 3% reserve obligation (verified above) is already law and already carries criminal exposure. Whether any particular sponsor complied is on no public record. HPD receives the filing. It publishes nothing.

Give one agency continuing jurisdiction. Not to run your building. To be the place a complaint goes.

Make the duties that already exist enforceable at a price a normal person can pay. Most of what boards owe owners is already law. What is missing is any route to enforce it that costs less than the thing being asked for.

We have drafted all of these. You can read them, including what each one deliberately does not do and every open question we have not resolved.

What you can do this week

If you own: ask your board three questions in writing: has a reserve study ever been done, what is the current reserve balance, and what capital work is anticipated in the next ten years. You are entitled to far less information than you probably assume, but a board that answers plainly is telling you something, and a board that will not is telling you something too.

If you are buying: find the reserve fund section of the offering plan and the most recent financial statement. Ask whether the building is a conversion, and if it is, ask whether the Local Law 70 reserve fund was funded and transferred. Ask whether any figure you are shown is a working capital fund rather than a reserve.

If your building was converted: that 3% reserve, verified above, was owed to you. It is worth finding out whether it arrived.

What we are not telling you

We would rather be trusted than believed, so here is what this letter does not establish.

• We do not know what any of this costs in total. No figure is offered, because none is measured.
• We are not saying your building is underfunded. We have no idea. Nobody does — that is the entire point.
• We are not accusing anyone. No sponsor, firm, board, or official is named as having done anything wrong. Where the Comptroller found improper abatements, we describe the finding and its stated cause and go no further.
• We do not claim the new advocacy organizations are acting in bad faith. We think their priorities are explained by structure, not motive, and we have said which structure.
• We have not read every relevant regulation. One provision that may already require part of what we propose (13 NYCRR § 23.3(ac)), we have identified but not read, and we say so in the bill rather than assuming it away.

Every factual claim above is sourced below. If one of them is wrong, we want to know.

Sources

Not sourced, and therefore not claimed:

• Any average or total cost of special assessments, facade work, or reserve underfunding in New York. Figures circulate. We have not been able to verify one we would put our name to.
• That the New York City Council has formed a co-op and condo caucus. It has not. A trade publication reported in March 2026 that one was forming; we drafted this letter with that claim in it. On checking, we could not open the article, the Council’s own press archive carried no such announcement, and its official caucus list showed nine caucuses and no such caucus. Then the office of the member the article named told us directly that the report was unconfirmed and that no such caucus exists. We were wrong, and the correction is in the body of this letter rather than deleted from it.
• Any claim that the ineligible units found in 2024 are the same ones left uncleared in 2016. Three audits, three scopes, three populations. What recurs is the category, not necessarily the units, and we say so where we describe it.
• Any claim that New York City enacted its local laws in order to raise revenue. We do not know that and do not assert it. What we describe is what the instruments do on their face: the deadlines are adjustable, the penalty schedule is not, and no provision returns anything to the buildings paying.
• Any claim that the local laws are unnecessary. Facades fall and emissions targets are a separate public argument. Our objection is to the enforcement design, not the underlying mandates.
• Any claim that a particular party benefits by design. We describe gaps in law and who is structurally advantaged by them. We do not assert that anyone created or maintains those gaps deliberately, because we have not established it and would not print it if we had not.
• Any figure for the number of units represented at the advocacy group’s early meetings. A figure circulated in secondary coverage; we could not confirm it from a source we read directly.

Written by CondosCoopsNYC. Every statutory citation was verified against a primary source on 2026-07-29. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it in public.