Inside Third & Bond: Week 117

This week the tax map cartographer approved our condominium tax lots, awarding Third + Bond the distinction of becoming the 2,685th condominium in the Borough of Brooklyn. What are condominium tax lots, and why are they important?

Every kindergartener knows what a house looks like – a lot of green grass, a square with a triangle on top, three windows, a door with a little circle in it and a chimney with a squiggly line coming out. But what is a condominium, and what does it mean to buy one? When you buy an apartment at Third + Bond, what do you actually own? A condo unit is property, but it isn’t a piece of land, and it isn’t a building so what is it?

New York passed its condominium act in 1964, legalizing a new craze in real property ownership that was sweeping the nation like British guitar pop. Unlike hippie-dippy co-operative ownership, where a non-profit corporation owns the building and shareholders are granted an exclusive lease to their apartments, condominium units are Real Property, for Real Americans.

When you buy an apartment at Third + Bond, you’re buying the deed to a tax lot, just as though you were buying a brownstone or a skyscraper. That tax lot, however, is a condominium tax lot, or condo lot, rather than a land lot. The condo lot bounds an actual box of space in the universe that measures from the underside of your Forest Stewardship Council certified quarter-sawn white oak floorboards to the top of your Energy Star recessed light fixtures. It also grants an undivided proportionate interest in the land below, the sky above and the foundation, superstructure, shared utilities, corridors, stairwells and roofs of the buildings what are known as common elements.

But before your condo lot can be bought, sold, taxed, mortgaged and gambled away in a poker game, it must be established by the borough tax map cartographer. It’s important to begin this process as early as possible. We know of one case where a developer obtained a certificate of occupancy on a new condo, only to wait several months before they were able close any units – because they were waiting for their tax lots.

Condo tax lots are defined by a set of documents filed with the cartographer. These documents exist to protect you in case your neighbor decides to expand her bathroom into your kitchen while you’re on vacation, à la Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development. They include the condominium declaration and detailed floor plans that show the legal boundaries of each apartment. The tax map cartographer reviews these submissions to ensure accuracy and consistency, and then assigns us 44 new tax lots ours are so fresh they still have that intoxicating new-tax-lot smell.

Because Third + Bond is comprised of eight separate buildings, there was another interim step. When we acquired the site, we bought five large land lots. Before the land lots could be carved up into condo lots, they had to be split into eight land lots one for each building. Although the land lots only existed briefly before the condo lots replaced them, this step is required because the buildings need to be able to exist on their own. The condominium could theoretically be dissolved by a supermajority vote of unit owners, and there need to be land lots to which the buildings can revert.

The City recently migrated the tax map records which have been hand-drawn in enormous hard-bound vellum books since Brooklyn was Breuklyn into a digital system. The new system is mostly a huge improvement, but it can be vexingly inflexible. Our ground floor duplex at 115 Third Street, for instance, has an entrance and postal address at 115 Third Street, but it’s actually located within the L-shaped building known as 404 Bond Street. The digital tax map system wasn’t designed to accommodate an also known as address, and we had to go a few rounds with the head cartographer before she agreed to allow it.

The new system also only permits unit designations of four characters or fewer. Although we would have liked to name the 4th floor two-bedroom at 406 Bond Street 406 Bond Street Unit 7, we were forced to settle for 4067. Not a big deal since most people don’t use their condo tax lot numbers on a day-to-day basis, but it could cause confusion down the line.

Last week the project was eight separate buildings, and today it is one condominium, divided into 44 apartments, united by the power of a legal document. It all seems a little abstract, but it’s a comfort to know that the invisible boundaries of those condo lots are permanent now, hovering silently over Brooklyn, hidden away inside the drywall.

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-116 [Brownstoner]
Our legal fine print: The complete offering terms are in an Offering Plan available from Sponsor. File No. CD080490. Sponsor: Hudson Third LLC, 826 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.