It looks like the legal structure for cooperative housing ("coop") like this originated in Germany and first came to the United States via New York City [1]: >

It looks like the legal structure for cooperative housing ("coop") like this originated in Germany and first came to the United States via New York City [1]: > The first housing cooperative in the United States organized under the Rochdale Cooperative Principles was developed in Brooklyn, New York in 1918 by a group of Finnish artisans - the Finnish Home Building Association. Coops remain extraordinarily popular in New York City. The vast majority of apartment buildings in Manhattan are coops. Many from elsewhere don't really know what this means. There are broadly two popular models of property ownership: 1. Condominiums. These are titled with the city and state as a distinct lot with the owner's name on it. Nearly always these are part of an HOA that is responsible for maintenance of common areas and establishing and enforcing rules. For reference, single-family homes ("SFHs") are typically in this model but in the US, SFHs aren't called condos. That's reserved for apartments and townhouses; and 2. Coops. The building is owned by a legal entity like a corporation. As far as the city and state are concerned, that whole building is one lot and is taxed as one unit. The coop is responsible for paying that property tax bill. You don't own your apartment the same way you do in a condo. You own shares in the coop that give you the right to a particular apartment. Maintaining the coop and paying expenses like property taxes is apportioned by the number of shares to each owner as a maintenance fee. It's worth noting that in New York state these two work very differently in terms of property tax assessment, which has been a point of contention between the city and the state for decades. Basically, coops are assessed in terms of Assessed Rental Value ("ARV") and condos/SFHs are not such that a coop might have an apportioned property tax bill of two times or more of a similarly valued coop. It also means a $100m condo has a tax bill of only 10-15x that of a $1m coop, which is ridiculous. Anyway, I wonder since this community is a coop how it gets caught up in this tax treatment compared to similarly valued SFHs in the area. [1]: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&context=econ_wpapers https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13...