No silver bullet for Amalgamated co-op owners

With no reserves left to pay for repairs to gas lines, where will they turn?

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Nearly 1,500 households across a dozen buildings in Van Cortlandt Village are struggling to come to grips with the costly implications of the city’s stringent new gas piping inspection requirements.

Amalgamated Houses, said to be the oldest limited-equity co-op in the country, does not have sufficient capital reserves to pay for repairs required by Local Law 152 enacted in 2016, its management says.

The buildings department has been rolling the rules out across the city’s community boards for that past three years. The city’s rule-making process has involved hiring a manufacturer to build hand-held gas detectors to the buildings department’s own specifications.

The devices can detect a gas leak as faint as 0.1 percent of the air. By comparison, most people can detect the smell of gas when it reaches about 2 percent.

The results of the gas piping inspections conducted at Amalgamated late last year have now been coming to light through word of mouth and notices from the co-op’s management team.

The pipes in eight of the co-op’s buildings are not up to spec, general manager Charles Zsebedics has informed residents. The inspection results have now triggered a timeline for the co-op to certify repairs or face penalties.

Residents and management convened on Zoom March 20 to debrief the situation. They were joined by local elected officials and Dean Roberts, an attorney with Norris McLaughlin and one of the city’s foremost experts on limited-equity co-ops.

“We’re not the only co-op in this situation,” Roberts said. “We’re just the earliest suffering on this one. I just want to reiterate that we aren’t surprised by this. We’ve been raising this issue for years.”

The New York Division of Housing and Community Renewal, the state housing agency that regulates capital financing and other aspects of limited-equity co-op management, has so far offered little assistance, noting the buildings are privately owned.

The gas crisis was a surprise to Barbara DiPietro, who told fellow Zoom attendees she knew nothing about the upcoming inspections when she bought into Amalgamated in March 2022.

When she moved in, she said she bought a new stove that set her back $800, though she fears she may not be able to continue using it.

“I believe this is a failure to disclose,” DiPietro concluded.

Roberts countered, “we didn’t know that it would become this serious.”

He said the co-op’s board members expected they would be able to get some help from the state agency, which they are now campaigning for in letters.  Board treasurer Ed Yaker even took a trip to Albany earlier this month to testify before a joint legislative hearing on the state’s housing budget.

If the condition of the pipes were found to be causing immediate danger, the inspection would have triggered a notification to Con Edison and the utility company would have shut off gas service, a spokesperson for the company explained to The Press.

Instead, residents are facing sticker shock.

Repairs would cost shareholders up to $7,500, according to management’s estimate.

The buildings department confirmed Gregory Quattlander, a licensed master plumber with New York Plumbing, Heating, & Cooling Corp., carried out gas piping inspections at Amalgamated in December, but could not immediately provide The Riverdale Press with copies of the inspection reports or confirm the cost of required repairs.

Thus far, Amalgamated has submitted inspection reports as the law requires, buildings department spokesperson Andrew Rudansky told The Press. 

The city’s enforcement actions “depends on conditions that are in need of repair,” he said.

Amalgamated Houses, Van Cortlandt Village, Charles Zsebedics,

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