The Apartment: Co-ops & Condominiums

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Manhattan TV Executive Charles M. Amory considered himself fortunate in getting a good buyer for his 16-room cooperative apartment at 117 East 72nd Street, one of Manhattan's older, better apartment houses. There was no question about the buyer's solvency; the husband was Actor Peter Lawford, and his wife, Pat, as everyone knows, is a Kennedy. After about a month of negotiation over the reported $125,000 asking price, the deal was set, and last week the co-op's board of directors met, as is the rule in cooperatives, to pass on the Lawfords.

The Lawfords were turned down. One man on the board singlehandedly blackballed them on the grounds that he liked neither actors nor Democrats.

Owning Your Own. This one-man veto was a dramatic demonstration of one of the differences between a co-operative and a new form of communal housing that is making rapid strides throughout the U.S.—the condominium. More and more buyers are demanding them, builders are building them, and state legislatures are making laws authorizing them. Last month New York became the 40th state to have done so in the past three years. A condominium (a word deriving from a 6th century B.C. Roman law of joint sovereignty) is, in effect, an apartment house in which tenants really own their own apartments.

Tenants in a cooperative merely own stock (based on the size of their apartments) in a parent corporation, which pays for the mortgage, the taxes and upkeep of the property. In a condominium, on the other hand, the tenant has title to his apartment, just as if it were a house. He arranges his own mortgage, thus may have to put down only, say, $10,000 of his own money on a $50,000 apartment. Co-op buyers customarily have to pay all cash, since the building is already mortgaged, though some coops permit buyers to make a down payment and pay the rest in installments.

Democrats Admitted. The condominium owner still has to pay his share of the maintenance costs. But there are other advantages: 1) he can arrange for the kind of mortgage he wants—paying off fast or slow; 2) if, in the unlikely event of a depression or a sudden decline in the neighborhood, all or most of the other occupants leave, the condominium owner is responsible for only his own mortgage and tax payments; the co-op owner, as a stockholder in the whole building, can be confronted with the alternative of paying the defaulting members' share or getting out himself; 3) the condominium owner can sell or rent to whom he chooses—including actors and Democrats.

Many realtors expect condominiums, long popular in Europe and Latin America, to bring back to the city many suburban families who.are attached to the idea of owning their own homes. Condominiums are abuilding from Puerto Rico to the Pacific; in Chicago alone, five large-scale condominiums have been started since the Illinois law permitting them was passed last July, while no new co-ops have been initiated.