Billboards on Co-ops/Condos: How to Make Money on Signage & Avoid Fines

Frank Lovece, a reporter for the 28-year-old New York co-op/condo-board magazine Habitat, interviewed me about billboard etiquette in NYC a few months ago. The article is a what to do and not do when thinking about renting the side of your co-op to an OAC. It is pretty straight forward, but if you are not familiar with how the process works, an interesting read. As the article is mainly about how to go about renting without getting in trouble with the law, we were contacted as an advocacy group familiar with some of the aesthetic and social issues surrounding outdoor advertising. Quoted at the end of the article, our question was just because you can make money off of selling our collective public spaces, does that mean you should?

Jan. 4, 2010 — Nearly one million dollars.

That's the amount of fines the city levied against 59 Fourth Avenue, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, for two years of illegal billboard signage. And though that figure is divided among the co-op there and the two companies that brokered and mounted the hanging vinyl billboards for the movie Twilight, TV's King of the Hill and Boost Mobile phones, it's still an enormous sum for any co-op or condo board to absorb. [MORE]