Where ‘Buy Low and Sell High’ Are a Co-op’s Fighting Words [New York City]
Morningside Gardens is a rarity in real-estate-mad Manhattan, a co-op apartment complex that middle-class New Yorkers can afford. Apartments sell for a fraction of what they would bring on the open market. For the chance to live free of a crushing mortgage and in a community that is unusually mixed, residents accept a trade-off: they give up the possibility of making a killing when they sell.
But the feverish real estate market is finally testing the convictions of the residents of Morningside Gardens, a cluster of six brick towers on a grassy expanse of the gentrifying borderland between Harlem and Morningside Heights. Later this month, the residents of the nearly 1,000 apartments are scheduled to vote on whether to amend their bylaws to let apartment sale prices triple immediately and be adjusted every year thereafter.