Everything we know about the lobby renovation surveys

Hello again! 

Since the Board released the renovation plans in late December, cooperators have been asking questions about whether—and to what extent—formal shareholder feedback informed the design brief and design process. Architects can only operate with the information they have been given by their client, and it was unclear what data or insights they were working with. 

In response to these questions, the Board has cited surveys related to the 2018 air rights referendum as the basis for the current proposal. A lot has changed since 2018 and this data was collected under completely different assumptions (a major cash windfall vs. a new mortgage) in entirely different conditions. It is not clear why newer research was not conducted. But since 2018 was the starting point we were given, we decided to look into it further. 

When asked to share more information about these surveys, the Board has downplayed the surveys’ importance, given evasive answers, or told us that further information about them is not available to shareholders. 

However, this week we were able to confirm on our own that there were two different surveys related to the potential air rights sale—and what these surveys tell us is quite interesting. 

The first survey was sent to all shareholders in 2016; we know about it because a cooperator was able to find the link to take the survey in their old emails, and the link still worked. You can see all of the details in the screenshots below.

This survey asked cooperators to rank a list of potential capital improvements in order of interest—so, what projects they’d most want to see completed if the air rights sold vs. the projects they don’t care as much about. Notably, this survey included the expected budgets for all of the possible projects, so cooperators had a specific price tag in mind when they ranked them. This is important, because knowing the cost would likely influence how someone would rank an item—for example, you might be into the idea of a SPC dog park if you thought it would only cost $100,000, but less so if it was going to cost $2M. 

What’s more, you can see that the costs given to shareholders in 2016 varied dramatically from the cost that was shared in the Jan 7, 2026 meeting; for example, in the survey “lobby renovations (all four buildings)” has an estimated budget of just $4M. If you add up all of the 2016 costs associated with the changes we are currently making (landscaping, security upgrades, front lawn landscaping, etc.), the total is around $8.8M. While it would have been impossible at the time to properly account for tariffs, interest rates, and inflation, this is a big jump and it’s reasonable to wonder if folks would have ranked lobby and landscaping renovations as high if they understood the final forecasted price tag would be roughly $32.7M. 

Unfortunately we have not been able to find the results of this survey—only the questions. If you have a record of the results, please share it and we will make it available to the group.

We do have the results for the second survey, which was conducted by NYC Meeting Facilitators in late 2017/early 2018. 

A shareholder found the high-level results of the survey in the publicly-available minutes from the January 11, 2018 Board meeting. You can see details in the below photo.

Thanks to these minutes, we know that the capital improvements included in the plan currently being proposed did not make the top three in terms of the most-desired uses of money. In fact, the highest-priority items were:

As you can see, nothing about lobby renovation, gym upgrades, or more usable green spaces was a top priority here. Also notable: NYC Meeting Facilitators called the findings “statistically significant,” according to the meeting minutes. However, we still don’t know exactly how this survey was framed to shareholders, all of the questions that were asked, or what additional information may have been presented with the questions. We will continue to press the Board to be more transparent about these missing details and we encourage you to ask them about the two surveys at the upcoming lobby meetings on Jan 20 and 21.

What we can learn from all of this

We would expect a $32 million investment on the part of our co-op to start with a clear understanding of shareholder priorities and goals. No matter how accurate the results of these two surveys are or aren’t, the results are so outdated and out of context as to be useless. 

Given how old these results are, and how misaligned they appear to be with the current plan, new research—which we know from our professional experience does not have to be expensive or time-consuming—is a natural next step in evaluating and refining the current proposals. We are calling on the Board to temporarily pause the project and seek shareholder feedback using a structured, thoughtful process. We also ask that they share all of the previous research that has informed the design process thus far, and make transparency the standard going forward. 

A few things you can do right now if you’d like to be proactive: 

We believe the Board should be transparent with shareholders in general, but especially when we’re dealing with a project of this magnitude. Let’s continue to hold them to a high standard.