At my condo law class last night I had a wonderful guest speaker, attorney Herbert Fisher of Chicago, who knows more about the law of housing cooperatives than just about anybody. It's natural to compare co-ops with condos. Why are there so many condos and so few co-ops, while at the same time there is so much conflict in condos and substantially less (from what I can see) in co-ops?

There is no one explanation, of course, but I think in a general sense the relative lack of conflict in co-ops and their small share of the housing market are probably explained by the same things: actual choice and real consent. The key reason for all the turmoil in CIDs is the fact that people are drawn by marketing and lack of alternatives into a form of shared ownership that many of them don't understand or like much, without ever really agreeing to live by the rules and accepting a reduced sense of dominion over their property.

If that is true, it suggests that if people had to actually ask to live in the CID and be interviewed by the BOD to get their approval, and had to actually mouth words of understanding and assent, there would be both less conflict and a lot fewer people living in CIDs. The ones who believe their home is their castle would get so angry during the interview ("Who do you people think you are, asking me all these questions?") that they'd either be rejected by the board or they'd qive everybody the finger, stomp out of the room, and cancel the sale. Probable net result: less conflict in condos, but a much smaller market share for condos. You could extend this logic to CID housing in general, including all the townhouse and HOA developments.

Does this mean that the law should give CID boards the power to interview and reject owners? It's not that simple, because there are many other differences between CIDs and co-ops. For example, in CIDs you have individual owners with individual mortgages, and they need to be relatively free to sell them. But it is an interesting thought experiment to engage in if you are trying to figure out why there is so much litigation coming out of CIDS.