My son is on a waiting list for an income-restricted coop, and now that he’s high enough to view apartments, I’ve noticed that the viewing paperwork says the housing company doesn’t supply window coverings, stoves , refrigerators or kitchen or closet flooring. Now, I wouldn’t expect window coverings to be supplied and having to supply the stove and refrigerator isn’t that strange - but flooring? I’ve never heard of an apartment or house that didn’t have kitchen/closet flooring. Flooring that needs to be replaced, maybe, but no flooring at all? It sounds as if the previous owners take the flooring with them - which is what I’m sure happens with the window coverings and I guess also the stove and refrigerator but I can’t understand why someone would pull up the kitchen flooring and take it with them. Does anyone know a reason for this or am I misunderstanding something?
Is the unit built on a concrete slab? Maybe the kitchen and closets just have the bare concrete exposed, but the other areas have flooring on top of the slab?
I guess it could be built on a concrete slab - but that wouldn’t explain why the kitchen wouldn’t have flooring if the other rooms do. And I know I’ve seen people online talking about installing flooring in the kitchen and closet which is why it seems like it gets pulled up when the previous owners move out.
For the kitchen, it may be cheaper and easier for the coop to clean up a food prep area that likely sees a lot of food spills, grease, and other residue, by just pulling up and disposing of any flooring, and cleaning the bare slab. If it’s income-restricted, they’re probably cutting every “luxury” they can to keep maintenance costs down.
As for the closets, it makes some sense to leave their floors unfinished to hold down costs, since they’re usually out of sight and not walked on. I can’t think of a good reason to pull up flooring installed by a tenant, though.
However, if the units are built without flooring in the kitchen and closets as a cost-saving measure, it may also be that any given unit may have flooring in those areas which were installed by a previous tenant, but the coop itself doesn’t provide such flooring, so their boilerplate lease agreement notifies the lessee of that fact. Which also means the coop is denying any responsibility for maintaining, repairing, or replacing any flooring in those areas which a previous tenant may have installed.
I guess I shouldn’t have assumed “co-op” would be understood ( I forgot they don’t exist everywhere). People don’t own a co-op in the same way they own a condo and they aren’t really tenants - but the owner of a co-op is responsible for everything “from the plaster on the walls in”. The co-op association is responsible if a pipe in the wall bursts but if the pipe under the sink breaks it’s the shareholder’s problem. So the co-op itself would never be responsible for maintaining or replacing any of the flooring.
But I guess that line could just be a strange way of notifying prospective buyers of that fact.
Or, again, it’s just boilerplate, informing the prospective buyer that the units weren’t built with finished flooring in those areas. Any given unit might have finished flooring which was added by a previous co-op member who occupied it. But you’re not guaranteed finished flooring in those areas in the specific unit you occupy.
(And even if the co-op association wouldn’t normally be responsible for maintenance, repair, or replacement anyway, it still makes some sense to me to officially declaim any responsibility for the quality of construction or installation of any after-market flooring a previous occupant added.)
ETA: I’ve got to admit, though, I’m just spit-balling here. Given that this is GQ, and I don’t actually know, I probably shouldn’t have actually replied.
I thought maybe it actually was a coop, which would explain why it had no flooring.
Where are you, out of curiosity?
NYC , where there are far more co-ops than condos
Nah, I hadn’t thought of it being basically unneeded boilerplate. So you helped me with a possible reason.
Something I noticed with many rental places here, was that kitchen floorings were considered somewhat of a consumable. They get damaged easily, and landlords would often replace them between tenants. (We are talking long term tenants here). This is especially true of floorings that are essentially a sheet of very high density foamed polymer.
So there may be some background to the exclusion. But that would I suspect be background to a boilerplate clause. One would find it odd if there was not a flooring.
I worked closely with the boards of two affordable housing coops in Washington, DC years ago so I have some experience, though not specifically with the laws or practices in New York. They may differ a bit but I suspect by not that much. In DC, affordable housing was generally made affordable through low-cost financing provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD’s rules, and they agreements they entered with the coops, are what preserve the affordability of the coops over time. HUD’s programs are national, so I suspect affordable coops in New York operated under these same programs, or perhaps similar state programs. In practice, affordable coops operate very differently than ordinary market-rate coops.
In DC, shareholders in a coop are also tenants of the coop. When they buy into the cooperative, they also sign a lease agreement as tenants. The tenants can be evicted for failure to adhere to the lease requirements. In the affordable buildings I worked with, if a resident was evicted, the coop effectively held the unit on behalf of the defaulting resident and resold it. The defaulting resident would get the amount of the sale price less any amount owed to the coop association. Resale prices were limited by the contract with HUD. Basically, shareholders were limited to the amount of the original (low) purchase price of the cooperative plus an amount of appreciation over time, which was intended to allow owners to build some equity in the coop but to still preserve the affordability for future buyers. In many cases, because of the low real-world resale values on the units and the often high levels of accumulated rents, damage fees, and unpaid utilities, the evicted residents often got nothing from the sale to the new person.
The term “owner of a coop” leads to some legal ambiguity. The cooperative association has shareholders, who are collectively the “owners” of the cooperative association. The coop shareholders do not technically own the apartments they live in. As coop shareholders, they have an exclusive license to lease the particular apartment from the association. The association as a whole owns the building and it is responsible for the entire building, inside and out, except for the things that the lease says that the tenant/resident are responsible for. You can see where this is heading. If the coop association says that they don’t provide flooring in the kitchen, the association isn’t responsible for maintaining the flooring in the kitchen over time.
The practice in DC affordable housing coops was to require the homes to have carpeting on (I think) 85% of the rooms’ floors, but not in closets. The carpet acts as sound deadening for the residents in the floors below. If a coop apartment didn’t have carpeting, the neighbors downstairs could complain and the coop association was responsible for reinstalling the carpet. The association was also responsible for periodically replacing the carpet as needed. There’s no need (or desire) to maintain carpeting in a kitchen.
HUD requires affordable housing associations to maintain certain minimum levels of housing quality, which HUD’s Real Estate Assessment Center periodically evaluates. In general, affordable housing cooperatives retain responsibility for all the things that HUD requires safe housing to have (such as working plumbing and safe electrical service) and few of the things HUD doesn’t. This is another way in which affordable coops tend to differ from market rate coops. Affordable coops are more likely to retain responsibility for things like internal plumbing leaks, HVAC systems, and light fixtures. But, if HUD doesn’t require apartments to have window coverings, the coop generally won’t provide them or be responsible for them. Some coops provide appliances; some don’t.
This is a WAG, but I’d guess that unless these are brand new units there will be kitchen flooring. It might be crappy and heavily worn though, and the coop wont be paying for a replacement if one is desired/needed.