“If we could do it, anyone could”

Many New Yorkers are familiar with the coop­er­a­tive home owner­ship model, other­wise known as the co-op. Yet even those who know co-ops well might be surprised to learn that this model first appeared in the US in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, at the hands of Finnish immi­grants looking to lower housing costs by pooling their resources. 

Sun Garden Homes, located at 637 – 661 41st St., is one of those 25-odd orig­inal Finnish co-ops, built in 1926 and owned and managed collec­tively ever since. The ethos at Sun Garden Homes has always been to do it your­self, so when the building started showing some severe wear and tear, several of its coop­er­a­tors banded together to figure out what they could achieve: They dove into fixing up the boiler, over­cladded the North wall, and patched up leaks, helping the co-op retain energy and run more efficiently.

Two of those coop­er­a­tors were Mike Weiss, who was the co-op board pres­i­dent from 2018 to the middle of 2020, and Samara Doucette, who took up the helm later on in 2021. Weiss works in solar energy, while Doucette works in hospi­tality sales; they both had to develop deep knowl­edge of their building to be able to take the lead on these repairs. They welcomed Skylight onto their roof one sunny March after­noon to chat about what they accomplished.

This inter­view has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Skylight: Samara, start us out by telling me about this building and your rela­tion­ship to it. 

Samara Doucette: I moved here in 2017. When I came in, obvi­ously I knew the building was self-managed, but I didn’t really know what that meant. Mike [Weiss] was on the board already. Early on, we had a leak behind the walls, and Mike had to come in while we were on vaca­tion and plow into the wall to fix a leak before it became some­thing much bigger. There was already a plan for redoing the façade, which Mike had started and was leading. I knew I would volun­teer at some point, but during the pandemic, my work slowed down a little bit, so I was like, well, this is a great oppor­tu­nity to do my service — without real­izing what I was undertaking.

And how about you, Mike?

Mike Weiss: I moved in 2008 with my partner Rachel, who was preg­nant at the time. We liked the whole vibe of the building and how people took an active role in taking care of it, and that it was inex­pen­sive. It just agreed with my sort of person­ality — I like to do things myself. 

Jan, [a neighbor] who prob­ably moved in 10 years before I did, he was sort of a house plumber, in a way. He was a super­in­ten­dent at a building in the city, but he did a lot of work with the boiler system here. Then there was another guy who did carpentry, and another contractor. They sort of did small roof repairs here and there and just kept things going. They lived in the building. 

So, you’ve done a ton in this building. I see solar panels on the roof with us — when did you get those?

MW: We started back in 2010 – 2011. We had trouble getting people on board initially, but it paid back in a couple of years, gener­ating revenue for the building.

SD: When I joined, we came in May, and the loan payments for solar were paid off by September. It was bite-sized enough for members to agree to. We were new tenants, thinking, ​“This is great, we get the bene­fits of solar, but we only paid for it for three months, through the purchase price of our home.”

MW: Between solar and sub-metering, we make around $20 – 25,000 a year. 

It sounds like you’ve tackled a lot. Tell me about the boiler first. When did that work start?

MW: It’s ongoing. Before I moved in, part of the shell rusted through, which fueled concerns that it would fail. That’s a chronic issue in a lot of these build­ings. One of the local laws that just kicked in was Local Law 87, which was a bench­marking local law that mandated measuring water and energy use in the building. We had to comply with that, so we ended up hiring Bright Power, which was a consulting firm at that point. They came in and did a study of the boiler and gave us recom­men­da­tions for how to vent the steam lines, just a bunch of prescrip­tive things, which we ended up doing.

The expec­ta­tion was the boiler was going to blow. Whenever we had an annual meeting, that was the message — ​“Oh, the boiler, it’s on its last leg.” It was prob­ably about 20 – 25 years old at that point, but I was deter­mined just to keep it going as long as we could. Local Law 97 hadn’t happened yet, but it seemed like a rash thing to replace the boiler in kind without thinking about improving the system. It’s a simple machine, when it’s demys­ti­fied — basi­cally a big teapot, boiling water.

How was Local Law 97 on your radar?

MW: [Our neighbor in the co-op and energy expert] McGowan Southworth was in energy in 2012, and I work for Solar One, a nonprofit doing solar. We were really into it. We were dealing with Chris McGinnis and others in this energy group. It wasn’t just a hobby, more of an interest. [Local Law 97] was defi­nitely top of mind.

So, once you real­ized you could repair the boiler instead of replace, how did you go about that?

MW: Jan, our in-house plumber, replaced many rusted conden­sate lines over the years, but we finally got ahead of it. We also turned down the firing rate, which had been running way too high. Mechanics would compen­sate for a poorly performing system by just turning up the pres­sure, which just causes overheating. 

SD: You also recal­i­brated things. We have some apart­ments that over­heat, and some apart­ments that under­heat. What was that work you did with the venting?

MW: Bright Power helped with that. They measured how long heat took to reach different parts of the building and recom­mended venting adjust­ments — installing a main vent in the area furthest away from the boiler, to push out air faster. Also, there’s an air vent on every­body’s steam radi­ator, and those air vents might have been painted over, or might not work, so we made a very concerted effort to just make sure that the steam system was breathing and oper­ating prop­erly. That helped a lot.

SD: Later, when I took over boiler main­te­nance, we updated the control panel, which was a really ancient piece of equip­ment. We did a lot of cleaning and tuning, replaced gaskets, and cleaned the chimney. Smaller, nuanced stuff. I learned way more about boilers than I ever thought I would in my entire life.

MW: Me too. My dad once told me, ​“You should really learn about boilers.” He was a doctor, so I thought that was the weirdest thing to say — but now I get it.

SD: And the expert we worked with on a lot of the boiler stuff, when he inspected our overall system, he said we were running at an 89.3 effi­ciency rate. That’s excel­lent, consid­ering that our boiler goes back to the 80s. I like that number! That’s a good number. It shows you can run a building on really old equip­ment and it’s still efficient.

Alright, now let’s talk about the façade over­cladding project. Was this a Local Law 11 upgrade?

MW: No, Local Law 11 applies to build­ings over six stories tall, so we didn’t have to comply. The issue was that we had chronic leaking on the north wall. The north wall became a thing — the North Wall.

The stan­dard treat­ment for that was that you’d have a masonry contractor come in, and they’d be like, ​“We’ll just throw a coating over the whole thing.” But if you do that, you’re in this main­te­nance schedule where you’re always going to be doing repairs every five years. And that’s costly in itself.

MW: We looked at [different types of] over­cladding. The stan­dard system is EIFS (Exterior Insulation and Finish Systems) — it’s an insu­la­tion layer covered with synthetic stucco. It’s common in Europe and commer­cial build­ings here. The beauty of that was that it would very effi­ciently cover the exte­rior of the building, keeping the freezing surface away from the brick, so you no longer have any freeze-thaw.

SD: As we were doing brick­work, we found lots of little pockets where there were more leaks and it was usually because the mortar was compromised.

MW: Exactly. Masonry build­ings of this era constantly deal with dete­ri­o­rating mortar, lintels, and leaks. EIFS prevents that. We formed a North Wall Committee to explore options, and even­tu­ally, we brought in archi­tect Chris Benedict, whose whole jam is energy-effi­cient retro­fits. She convinced several of us in the building to do the [EIFS] over­cladding system, because it was econom­ical and would save a lot of energy. Eventually, Samara and [another resi­dent named] Alexander almost became the general contractors.

SD: Alexander is an archi­tect, he lives in the building, too, and his exper­tise was invalu­able. Without him, this wouldn’t have happened. It was the right deci­sion to push forward, but it was messy. 

MW: This became a classic example of scaf­folding that just doesn’t go away. We did the first step of EIFS and got the wall solid enough, but then COVID hit. And now we were committed — we were spending $55,000, $60,000 a year on scaf­fold rental.

SD: The board tried to find solu­tions, but COVID threw things off. When I joined, we had to start from scratch — there were insur­ance issues and no real contrac­tors lined up. So Alexander and I took charge, found a new archi­tect, and reeval­u­ated the project to ensure we stayed on course.

We could have just said, ​“No, we’re not going to do EIFS.” We had a coat on and we could have just done regular cladding, but I think we were afraid that the same prob­lems would continue to persist. And also, we wanted to honor the deci­sions that had already been made and see this through, and it was going to help us with Local Law 97. 

When did it close? Is the infa­mous North Wall done?

SD: The wall is done! All the east, west, and north walls are done, and all the lintel repairs are finished. The only issue left is that the yard lights they installed are glaring into people’s apart­ments and disturbing our neigh­bors. They’re going to install an alter­nate light soon, and once that’s done, we can close the project. We’re really in the final stage.

Congratulations! Can you circle back a little to the financing and how you made that work?

SD: Our trea­surer at the time, Seth Pearce, really took that on — thank God. He got different options from various banks. NCB was one of them. We presented the whole package of the work to the member­ship in a special meeting, explaining every­thing we were hoping to do, including the loan amount. There were a few loan options presented, and the member­ship voted on it. [Editor’s note: The board chose from two $2.4M ten-year loan options.]

Did the loan cover the entire project, or did you also ask for contri­bu­tions from members?

SD: Yes and no. We had to ask for contri­bu­tions from members [in the form of assess­ments] because the reserves were drained over the years due to internal issues like plumbing fail­ures. I don’t think you can solely blame the assess­ments on the façade project, though. We took out a loan with an option for an extra line of credit that we could tap into, which we did. We didn’t want to increase costs, but there were a few unfore­seen issues, like fire escapes that needed to be added and some extra masonry work. It was the right time to handle every­thing. We didn’t want to hire another archi­tect down the road, which would’ve been three times as expen­sive. So we did as much as we could while we had the resources.

Has the project’s comple­tion made a differ­ence in your day-to-day life? I imagine it might be warmer now in your apartment.

SD: Yes, for sure. I think several members noticed it. Since we were also able to tweak the boiler, I barely need to turn on my radi­a­tors now unless the temper­a­ture is really, really cold. The building overall is retaining more heat, I think, with all the insu­la­tion. The water intru­sion issue is gone, which was a huge part of why we started this project. It’s made a massive differ­ence because so many other prob­lems stemmed from that.

MW: [This project] just looked like a smart thing to do as far as ongoing main­te­nance, because masonry walls are always going to need main­te­nance, and this would really knock down that cycle because it’s a very durable repair. 

But energy effi­ciency was also a huge part of it — reducing the cost of running the building. I did the fuel savings calcu­la­tions last year, and even with a much colder winter, we’re using about 20% less.

How would you advise other people who are maybe being forced to take action and decar­bonize their build­ings, but they don’t know where to start, or are hesi­tant to get going?

SD: Don’t do it… I’m just kidding. No, I mean, look, if we could do it, anyone could do it. That’s really the message. I’m a hotel sales­person — now, I know more about lintels and brick than I ever thought I would.

MW: I guess it’s also just finding the right people, right? Designers, archi­tects, or contrac­tors who can offer good guid­ance — that’s key.

SD: Yeah, finding good people. I mean, it’s like a ballet. It wasn’t just a construc­tion project; it affected our insur­ance, our oper­a­tions. It impacted all aspects of running the building. For build­ings that already have manage­ment compa­nies, it’d be much easier. You still have to make deci­sions as a board, but some of the logis­tics and small stuff that we got caught up in, which was really cumber­some, could be handled by them. 

For build­ings to start saving… I think that’s another thing. We were really conser­v­a­tive on our main­te­nance. Start plan­ning ahead, getting that finan­cial ground­work in place so that when the hard deci­sions come up, you’re not panicking. It was stressful — thinking, ​“This is a big ask of the people I live with.” But if you can lighten that load, it helps.

If we hadn’t done this, we would be in really bad shape for a lot of reasons. I think it can seem really daunting, but we just had to rip the band-aid off and move forward. We had a very moti­vated board. We lamented many times when it got tough, but it was very rewarding, too, to see it all come together.