SPC History Rhymes
[and a Call for a Re-Referendum]

The Seward Park community consists of original tenants and recent buyers; retirees, families, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives; and people living in efficiency studios and deluxe breakthroughs. Our extreme diversity creates a wide spectrum of financial priorities. Some of us push for modern amenities and some push to boost the market value of our apartments, while others view every maintenance increase as a threat to our ability to stay here1! With such competing interests, it’s not surprising that there is speculation and distrust surrounding every financial decision our Board makes.

Still, amazingly, our co-op once overwhelmingly agreed on one thing… In 2014, Shareholders passed a referendum by a whopping 82.3% demanding that a two-thirds supermajority of voting Shareholders be required to approve any sale of our Air Rights. It’s worth emphasizing that a sizable supermajority voted to demand this supermajority!

Fast forward to 2018, when this referendum was put to the test. In that year, our community voted on the proposed sale of Air Rights. The proposal garnered 56.2% support, but failed to achieve the required two-thirds threshold, and the Air Rights were not sold. Whether the proposal’s failure was due to its flawed characteristics, the lack of community involvement, or the manner by which our Board tried to force it on the community (in my opinion, all three), the bottom line is that the will of the Shareholders – as codified in the 2014 referendum – carried the day.

You would think that our Board would have learned from this – that, going forward, they would proactively engage the community in any proposed sale of Air Rights! But instead, in 2021, they subverted the community with a new referendum that reversed a key provision of the 2014 referendum – with this, only a simple majority (50% + 1) of voting Shareholders would be needed to approve the sale of Air Rights. Notably, this 2021 referendum passed by 58.3% – a similar proportion of the vote as the failed 2018 Air Rights referendum. In effect, the same people who cast their votes to sell our Air Rights were now changing the rules so that they could win next time with fewer votes. Rather than learn from their mistakes – rather than dedicate themselves to proposing better deals and better engaging the community – our Board chose to change the rules.

So, why am I spending time talking about past referenda and Air Rights? It is my contention that despite the wording of the 2014 referendum, its spirit was about more than just Air Rights. A vote of 82.3% represents a mandate! It indicates that Shareholders overwhelmingly want to take part in planning the scope, features, and selection of massive discretionary projects that aim to permanently alter the shape of our property and our experience living here – not only pertaining to the sale of Air Rights, but to any similarly massive project!

The proposed $32 million remodeling of our Lobbies & Grounds was certainly such a massive project! But just consider that – as we learned at the January 7th webinar – for two years, our Board has worked in secret to invite proposals, receive renderings, consult with designers, architects and developers, and spend 2.5 million of our dollars – while not for a moment letting Shareholders know what they were planning, not inviting our ideas, and not allowing resident experts to weigh in on the plans. The only time they saw fit to involve the community was when it was time to unveil their plan to us, and when doing so, they carefully controlled the narrative and curated the questions with the single aim of uncritically advancing the deal!

To be clear, our Board’s exclusion of the community was deliberate – on the overview of the project published on the SPCampus website, they stated:

[…] With 5-6,000 people, multiple vendors, and plans that evolve as new information surfaces, we determined that board leadership would serve the co-op better than a committee structure […]

As with the Air Rights plan, if the plans they made were ideal, that’d be great! But, their plans were deeply flawed, and remarkably expensive.

A number of Shareholders banded together and produced a very successful petition (which, as of this writing, has garnered more than 600 signatures) to challenge the project’s features and costs, and to demand that Shareholders be allowed to participate in the process. Their original petition stated (with emphasis added):

[...] We have serious reservations about the limited shareholder consultation on the proposed lobby and common area changes and request a short pause to gather input through a structured best practice engagement process to ultimately improve the plan.

Our Board responded that they will indeed pause, and will scale down the project ... but our Board did not respond to the most pertinent demand of this petition – no input is being sought! In fact, the Board's scaling down the project absent further community collaboration is itself a demonstration that they don't plan to collaborate! Don't be fooled – their saying “we will be sharing more about how we plan to engage with shareholders throughout the next phase” is not at all the same as “we plan to invite Shareholder participation in the next phase”. As of this writing, there is no indication that they will seek Shareholder input.

Shareholders can provide valuable input, but at present, the only ideas that the Board is considering are its own, those proposed by outside designers, and perhaps those that have been shouted by the loudest voices. (They may also cite past surveys which were flawed or irrelevant.) At the same time, there are architects, designers, developers, and all sorts of people in this community who would be eager to participate, but whose insights and ideas have never been solicited.

Shareholders should demand that our Board formally open itself to community collaboration on this project, and that it demonstrates that Shareholder input is being truly and fairly considered.
Personally, I would go even further… Massive projects will permanently change our landscape – is it really too much to demand that such projects are resoundingly popular? Even apart from the proposed Lobbies project, our Board has received many renderings and proposals over the years, and I believe that they still aim to pursue a sale or development opportunity. Frankly, I think various pursuits could be very popular and profitable! But in any case, with this in mind, I call for the supermajority threshold from the 2014 referendum to be formally reinstated, and for its language to be expanded to include the sale or development of any property, or massive discretionary spending of any kind. In my opinion, our Board should embrace this change – a two-thirds supermajority is desirable and achievable! But to get there, our Board needs to step out of its silo and engage our community in order to develop a decidedly popular plan.