Teri Karush Rogers

My first place in New York was a shared shag-carpeted room in an SRO hotel, the top six floors of which NYU had taken over to house transfer students like me in "on-campus" housing 25 blocks from campus. During my 20s I continued to pay my apartment dues along with my student loans, graduating from shares paid for in cash to being an actual named tenant on a lease.

Apparently, there are few things more laundry-offensive than washing your kid's dirty cloth diapers in the communal laundry room:  "I am totally in favor of cloth diapers BUT I would seriously consider trying to get a person removed from the building or go to the co-op board and complain if a shareholder in our building regularly washed dirty cloth diapers in the public machines," says one apartment dweller on UrbanBaby, summing up the common viewpoint on a thread that posits an interesting compromise: Why not reser

Over on Habitat Magazine's BoardTalk forum, a board member inadvertently confirms everyone's worst fears about co-op boards:  "We sent a notice to cure to an elderly shareholder demanding she get rid of her small non-nuisance causing dog," the board member writes.  "She had the dog for many years, everyone knows it, but we decided to try to get her to do it anyway. She also has letters from doctors stating dog is emotional support animal.

As we have noted previously, effectively staging your apartment for sale is philosophically akin to giving it a shot of Botox, involving as it does erasing your personality and personal effects to make way for a buyer's fantasy.  Similar principles apply when you prepare your apartment for its photo shoot.  

Thanks to Natalie Raben at M&M Pest Control for alerting us to a rather shocking forecast made at yesterday's Congressional Bed Bug Forum in Washington D.C.