Over boards

The embattled chairman of the board looks across the table and forms his words deliberately. ''It is not a story about condo boards," says Touraj Naghieh. ''It is really a story about money."

Money, and lots of it, has been the crucible at 50/60 Longwood, a 175-unit Brookline condominium facing a $18 million overhaul. Naghieh, 40, and four trustees have faced stiff resistance from owners who say the board is spending too much of their money on unnecessary repairs and improvements.

''The situation is very, very bad," says Ella Friedman, one of the owners who oppose the board's decisions. She has lived at 50/60 Longwood since emigrating with her husband and son from Russia in 1989. Friedman says the trouble reminds her of the hardscrabble existence in Leningrad under the heel of rulers who eschewed the common good. She believes the members of her condo board ''are after all the money and they will bankrupt us." Friedman chokes back tears on the phone as she tells her side of the story: ''It's about big money and people who come to power as we become absolutely helpless."

In a dizzying era of soaring condo prices and record-setting numbers of sales, the story is about money and power. And it is about the way you lead your life, because condominium boards, charged with spending other people's money, have wide berth to supervise the quotidian personal matters of property owners. Politically, a condo is a post-modern ''Animal Farm" where everybody's equal but some are more equal than others, depending on square footage and board membership. These governing bodies are made up of three, five, or seven elected members. The trustees micromanage or hire management companies to enact board policies.

In a city where all politics is local, the condo trust is the epitome of local authority. The board can inflame passions in multi-unit residences where disputes between neighbors flare up over issues as major as multimillion-dollar assessments and as minor as carpeting. The fights can be fierce, because these disputes hit people where they live.

Condos have been dominating the city's red-hot sales market.

According to the Boston Condominium Research Report, recently released by Northeast Apartment Advisors of Acton, more than 3,167 condos have sold so far this year in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge (Somerville was not included). If the hot selling trend continues, 2005 could be the biggest ever for condo sales, surpassing the 2004 record of 5,784. Of all the sales, 46 condos went for $3 million and over -- record numbers for luxury units. During the first quarter of 2005, the average selling price of a condominium in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge was $535,017.

Condos offer convenience to urban dwellers who want the satisfaction of home ownership without the toil of house and yard, but condo residents are not masters of their domain. They own the walls and floors inside their individual nest, but they live in a tight society of intimate strangers with varying incomes and standards. Many choices are not their own.

''People's perception of 'condo' is of a very carefree existence," says Gwen Simpkins, a board member at 50/60 Longwood who moved from a single-family home in Newton and finds the perception is not a reality. ''People who don't want the hassles of a house and a roof and painting and mowing the lawn, so they're going to a condo. The headache is someone else's. That is somehow the enduring myth of condo living.

''If anything, it's harder than owning your own house because not only do you have to deal with all the same issues that you do as a homeowner -- your roof, your siding, your this, your that -- but the numbers are bigger and you gotta do it by committee and consensus and personalities. It's very, very hard."

Condo boards do not have a mandate to please everyone. But they are bound by fiduciary responsibility to represent all the owners' interests. The need to safeguard the worth of the property can cause a collision of class and culture values in gentrifying neighborhoods such as the Fenway, where longtime residents fear newcomer trustees merely want to splurge on quickie cosmetic enhancements to inflate sales prices rather than invest in long-term capital improvements.

Stone lions
Suzanne Comtois, 60, a longtime Fenway resident, disputes her board's expense of $10,000 to redecorate the common areas at Queensberry Court, an 88-unit complex.

''The carpet is a disaster after a year," says Comtois. ''It's got black marks and you can't wash them. The dye just kind of settled. It looks pretty bad. And we spent a lot of money."

At a recent board meeting, Comtois was distressed to hear discussion of putting up gates outside Queensberry Court.

''Definitely different values are coming out," says Comtois, a nurse who served on her board for 2 1/2 years until ''nobody asked me about running again." She lost favor when she pushed for an experimental solar installation to save fuel costs, which was rejected by her board colleagues. ''So, I just live here now," she says. ''There might always be tension between the old people and new people."

Helen Cox lives in Lincoln Halls, a 70-unit condominium on Park Drive. Cox is a veteran Fenway housing activist who has lived in her apartment since 1972 and bought it in 1985. She is not on her board but questioned the priorities of her building's trustees, who voted to put stone lions outside the front door a few years ago. ''And they're not even big lions," she says. ''They're out of proportion with the rest of the building."

Draconian rules
Condo owners are subject to board decisions as superficial as stone lions and as serious as monthly maintenance fees and yearly capital assessments. Boards determine parking rules, infrastructure repair, flower plantings, and guidelines for how pets and even humans should behave. Condo boards intrude into picky lifestyle issues, as happened in the case of a Back Bay woman who was repeatedly threatened with fines by the board of her Marlborough Street brownstone for coming home after 10:30 p.m. -- the witching hour for ''quiet hours" as mandated by the board.

Attorney Robert Muldoon, a Boston trial attorney who handles condo cases, will not name his curfew-challenged client, but he says that some boards try to ''remove all pain from life with Draconian kind of rules." In this case, the unlawful behavior involved ''too much noise turning [the] key in the lock."

Muldoon advised his client to rally a majority group of sympathetic neighbors and vote out the board clock-watchers, which she did.

''People have the inherent impulse to want to control," says Muldoon. ''Folks who cause the problems in condos are not causing them out of concern for other people but because they know they're right and you're not. Every condo is a society, bound by physical boundaries and bound by agreements which are variously too loose or almost fascistic."

Democracies are messy
Putting controls on condo boards can be sublimely democratic. Members of the board are voted in and voted out. Recall petitions force elections. Residents can bring lawsuits, which rarely make it to court, according to Muldoon. However, there are no condo cops to oversee the condo boards.

A board member from hell is ''someone with their own agenda," according to Melanie Lange, president of Condo Management magazine, published in New Bedford. ''This person is probably not interested in doing a complete job with the best interests of the community as a whole in mind. They are only on the board to get what they want and that's it. Also, some people get a little drunk with power and they become unreasonable and dangerous."

Representative Kevin Honan, a Democrat from Allston-Brighton who's cochairman of the Legislature's joint housing committee, hears from constituents about condo boards run amok. He's scheduled a hearing Sept. 27 to address many of the issues.

''The increasing number of condominiums and increasing number of complaints from condo owners regarding management companies and the boards of condominium associations warrants close attention," says Honan. ''I hope the hearing will be a forum for owners to express what changes, if any, we need to make in condo laws."

Right now, the law, Chapter 183A, has teeth only for boards to put liens on properties of deadbeat residents who don't pay monthly fees or assessments. There is no language about codes of conduct for condominium trustees or management companies.

At 50/60 Longwood, the unhappy residents hired an attorney who advised them to oust Naghieh, Simpkins, and the current board members by mounting a recall. The effort was unsuccessful because the dissenters did not have the majority to force a vote.

Friedman and her neighbors now face an assessment estimated at $100,000 per unit to repair and resolve many big-ticket issues including buckling brick, a crumbling parking garage, tenuous balconies, faulty HVAC and electrical systems, a leaky facade, and lobby renovations. The complex, built in the late 1960s, had not been properly maintained nor were capital improvements figured into the yearly budgets, according to the board.

The trustees say they share the pain of the residents who oppose the cost and inconvenience of the planned three-year construction. After all, they must suffer, too.

''It seems they think for some reason the board owns the building," says Naghieh. ''It appears that we are the landlord and somehow, we want to better the building at their expense and they think this is our building."

The board members say the decrepitude came as a surprise to them, too.

''This was the first time I had purchased a unit," says Michael Tapella, 25, ''so I made a lot of assumptions about the building and what I was buying into. As a trustee, I've learned so much more about how buildings operate and the capital structure of the building. The next time I buy I'm definitely going to be asking some more questions about the way things are structured."

The communication game
The heartache at 50/60 Longwood -- not to be confused with Longwood Towers, a venerable Brookline apartment building that will soon convert to condos -- stems in part from the disparate incomes and expectations of the residents.

The conflict is less intense at Burroughs Wharf, a 61-unit condominium building on Boston's Waterfront where serious structural issues -- rusting support girders, freezing and flooding of units, and disintegrating balconies -- also forced hefty assessments averaging $100,000 per owner spread over three years. The residents responded to the crisis by voting out board members and demanding more of the management company. Clifford Green, a retired professor of theology, joined the trustees during the turbulent time.

''We've had the same group over the last few years, which means several of us have been reelected. We've been preoccupied, of course, with building problems," he says. ''What we've been doing is correcting the sins of the developers. Now, we've essentially done that." This September, Burroughs Wharf owners will cough up their last assessment.

Green thinks the mood of the community has completely changed toward the board because ''we are committed to maintaining open communication with everybody."

Freudian slips
Frequent communication between the board and the residents eased the struggle at Burroughs Wharf. A financial cushion also soothed the drama. Many of the owners had second homes for easy escape during construction. Many could easily afford the assessment because they are in similar high-end income brackets. All saw the worth of their condos increase. ''While no one likes paying out big assessments, at least the appreciation of the properties has more than covered those expenses," says Green.

The monetary issues are particularly wrenching in condos where residents do not have the luxuries of vacation homes or fat bank accounts.

''What really hurts in condos with residents of disparate incomes can be an assessment that causes a lifestyle change for some and, for others, is a drop in the bucket," says Betsy Van Dorn, a trustee of Burroughs Wharf.

However, for richer or poorer, every board of every condominium faces the problems caused by aging brick, concrete, and steel. Dealing with peoples' frailties and the vanity of self-interest over the common good is far trickier to patch and solve. No matter how altruistic the motives of condo trustees, human egos and personalities inevitably clash or reach consensus, which leads attorney Muldoon to suggest condo control can be a Freudian thing.

''The narcissism of small differences, that's what Freud called it," he says. ''It's the narcissism fed by promoting the idea that the small differences you have with your neighbor must be maintained because you are more important than your neighbor."

Monica Collins has served on her condominium board for more than a decade. She's participated in many situations similar to those reported above. E-mail her at mcollins@globe.com.

The ins and outs

Condominium: A housing development that allows a person homeownership without sole responsibility for maintenance and upkeep. The owners pool their money, usually by paying a monthly fee, and hire vendors to vacuum the lobby, plow snow, paint, and make repairs. Condominiums are governed by rules and regulations that all residents must follow. There is a board of directors composed of owners who make decisions for the whole community.

Common area: Any space that is shared by the owners: the lobby, hallways, landscaped areas.

Cooperatives: Buildings in which residents own shares -- how many depends on square footage -- in the corporation that owns the building. A board of directors runs the corporation.

Reserve: Funds set aside specifically for capital improvements and replacements.

Reserve studies: A professional report predicting the lifespan of existing big-ticket items and future replacement costs. The reserve study provides valuable information for preparing a budget, keeping a schedule for repairs and maintenance, and obtaining a loan.

Condo fee: A monthly payment, usually determined by a unit owner's percentage share in the condominium. Fees cover regular expenses and help build the reserve. A Massachusetts housing law stipulates that boards of trustees can place a lien on the property of any condo owner who does not pay the fees.

Assessment: Monies above and beyond the monthly fees that are needed to offset an unexpected expense. The total amount is divided among the owners.

Capital expense: The funds needed to replace or repair big-ticket items such as the boiler, HVAC system, and roof.

Rules and regulations: Codes set and enforced by the board of trustees. When the rules are broken, the trustees can fine the offending owner.

MONICA COLLINS

Source: Condo Management magazine