The Anti-Co-Op Act

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The New York Sun

It’s no doubt going to take a few weeks for the idea to sink into the city’s political debate that the city council is toying with the idea of a law to require co-op boards to tell applicants why they have been rejected. Yet, as the Sun’s David Lombino reported Monday, they seem to be seriously considering it. The chief proponent of the bill, Hiram Monserrate of Queens, told Mr. Lombino that, “the issue is really one about fundamental fairness. A citizen of America who wants to purchase a co-op in an apartment building in a certain part of New York City should be given the reason they are denied. They should be told why.”


The theory seems to be that it isn’t enough that laws already bar racial, gender, disability, religious, or age discrimination – or bias of just about any other stripe – in housing. Potential homebuyers have the right to hear a co-op board tell them that they just don’t think they would get along. The city council has a track record enacting frivolous and embarrassing laws, but this is something special. If illegal discrimination can’t be uncovered, a co-op board would be foolish indeed to admit it in one of these new disclosures. But it’s not hard to see this being an invitation for increased litigation as more disgruntled would-be buyers take co-op boards to court to get them to reconsider their decisions.


Call it the “Anti-Human Nature Codification Act.” As anyone who has worked in an office can attest, getting along with every member of a large group can be difficult indeed. As anyone who has ever shared accommodations with a less-than-stellar roommate would add, living with someone you don’t like can be even worse. One attraction of co-op living has been that it offers the opportunity to avoid living near people with whom an owner senses he or she would come into conflict. The law already bars outright discrimination, but it shouldn’t try to bar personality differences, differences of taste, or other bases on which Americans exercise the right of free association the Constitution forbids the Congress and subsidiary legislatures from abridging.


Indeed, in its nature the idea being developed in the council here is hostile to the very idea of cooperative living, which has become a standard way of association for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. But maybe there’s a silver lining to this dubious idea. To judge by the bill’s text, the city council has suddenly stumbled into an interest in things that have “interfered with economic transactions, limited mobility, [and] exacerbated the City’s housing shortage by impeding the optimal efficiency of the housing market.” If that’s what’s bothering the council, it will eventually get around to rent control and overly restrictive zoning.


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