24 Clinton Street

The building presents as a six-story brick apartment house built to the Heights' mid-1920s formula: a masonry street wall scaled to the row houses around it, an elevator, an interior court that brings light and air to the rear lines, and apartments organized on the prewar plan of entry foyer, separated kitchen, and defined rooms. No architect attribution survives in the public record — the lot sits outside the historic district, so the Landmarks Preservation Commission's building-by-building research does not reach it, and the conversion documents name engineers and counsel but not a designer.

Unit composition is where the diligence work sits. The 1984 plan covered 58 apartment units, city records carry 60, and the fiscal 2017 audit describes 56 residential apartments. That drift, in a building tenant-owned since 1987, is the ordinary result of combinations approved over decades, and it makes the specific apartment's share allocation, layout, and renovation state a more reliable guide than line-to-line comparison. The corporation also carries at least one apartment as a rental, with apartment rent recorded as other revenue alongside laundry income.

Because the building is outside the historic district, exterior work does not require Landmarks approval — a meaningful operating difference from most Heights co-ops of this age. The corporation replaced all of the building's exterior windows under a contract priced at $271,120, running from fiscal 2013 to completion in fiscal 2016, without landmark-grade review.

30 Clinton Street Tenants, Inc. runs as a shareholder-controlled corporation with professional bookkeeping and a light management fee — $16,000 a year in the fiscal years audited, a self-directed board's fee structure rather than a full-service agency arrangement. Fiscal 2017 operating expenses ran to roughly $205,000, dominated by payroll and union costs; real estate taxes of about $207,000 were the single largest line in the budget, against total revenue of roughly $703,000 and an operating surplus for the year.

The reserve posture is the strongest argument the building makes in a lender's file: at the 2017 audit the corporation held a capital improvement fund of $513,057 and reserve funds of $356,319 against essentially no debt. The auditors note that management has not commissioned a formal reserve study, so the reserve is discretionary rather than engineered — worth asking about, along with the Local Law 11 façade cycle and any assessment history since the window project.

Service level is the district's standard at this scale: elevator, resident superintendent, basement laundry, assigned storage, and house rules routing service complaints in writing through the managing agent or the board — plus the texture of a self-governing building, from an elevator-padding protocol for move-ins to an 80 percent floor-covering requirement and a requirement that every shareholder leave keys with the superintendent.

Flip tax: 15 percent of the seller's profit — sale price less the price the seller originally paid — payable at closing. Adopted by shareholder vote July 29, 2004 into Paragraph 16(h) of the proprietary lease. Proceeds go to the Capital Improvement Reserve Fund, with a board discretion added in the same amendment to apply transfer-fee revenue to operating expenses or non-capital projects where the corporation has tax losses available to offset the income.

Residency: Required. Only people who will live in the apartment may be named on the stock certificate and proprietary lease; parents may guarantee but may not be on title. Pied-à-terre, investor, and parent-for-child purchases are structurally precluded.

Pets: Permitted unless expressly disapproved in writing by the board in the individual case; dogs carried or leashed in public areas. Applicants may be asked to bring the pet to the interview.

Washer/dryer: Not permitted in apartments.

Board process: Full application through the managing agent with a $150 fee and seven copies, an Admissions Committee interview and recommendation, and a board decision that may follow a second interview. Approval is at the board's sole discretion and no reason need be given for a denial.

Subletting, financing minimums: Not documented in the materials reviewed; confirm both at offer stage.

Recent sales

Recent transfers at this building, curated by The Roebling Team research desk. Prices are the transfer amounts recorded with the NYC Department of Finance; apartment-level detail is checked against the building’s own file in The Roebling Research Library before publishing.

Market read. $/sf is measured on the latest sales with reliable square footage (2015): a median $1,016/sf across 2 sales. The building has traded as recently as 2026. Median listing discount 0.0% from the last ask.

Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 3-00238-0061) and verified listing data. Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified by The Roebling Team research desk. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price.

Model the flip tax on your exit, not just the seller's. Fifteen percent of profit is the steepest transfer-fee structure in the Heights' mainstream co-op inventory. It does not affect your purchase price, but it will affect your eventual net, and it belongs in the hold-period math from day one.

You have to live here. The residency requirement is explicit and enforced at the application stage. If the plan is a pied-à-terre, an investment purchase, or a parent buying for a student, this building is not the one.

Have counsel confirm what survives from the HPD chapter. The 1987 City deed carried a profit-recapture restriction tied to the life of the City's purchase-money mortgage, and the corporation was organized under Article XI of the Private Housing Finance Law. The audited financials show no mortgage payable and the shareholders adopted their own transfer fee in 2004, but which restrictions still attach to a specific apartment's shares is a title-and-counsel question worth asking directly.

Confirm the unit count, the share allocation, and the laundry rule. Sixty units in city records, 58 in the plan, 56 in the audit — price the shares on the specific apartment and confirm any combination approvals. And House Rule 14 prohibits washing machines in apartments, a threshold issue rather than a negotiating point for many buyers.

Lead with the balance sheet. A debt-free cooperative with a capital improvement fund and separate reserves is an underwriting asset with lenders and buyers' attorneys alike; most competing prewar listings in the Heights cannot say the same.

Set price with the transfer fee already in the model. A 15 percent fee on profit is unusual enough that the other side will not price it in for you. Run net proceeds first, then position.

Frame the building fully. The tenant-purchase history is a distinctive story and sophisticated Heights buyers respond to it — but it comes with questions about residency, transfer fees, and the HPD chapter that are better answered in the marketing than discovered at contract.

Price against the district's non-doorman elevator tier. The right comparables are Heights prewar co-ops with an elevator and a superintendent, not the full-service Montague and Pierrepont corridor buildings whose maintenance runs heavier. The absence of landmark jurisdiction is worth naming: buyers who have been through a Landmarks window application elsewhere in the Heights understand what it saves.

If you're considering 24 Clinton Street, also evaluate:

• 40 Clinton Street — the 1964 co-op immediately south on the same block and same side of the street; postwar scale and staffing against 24 Clinton's prewar rooms
• 130 Clinton Street — the 1925–26 tower at Joralemon, converted 1976; the Clinton Street spine's landmark-district alternative
• 99 Clinton Street — the ten-unit church conversion at Remsen; boutique scale on the same street
• 114 Clinton Street — mid-size Clinton Street co-op south of Pierrepont
• 22 Monroe Place — the 53-unit 1927 prewar co-op on the same tax block, inside the historic district
• 21 Monroe Place — small converted apartment house on the block's quiet side street
• 123 Pierrepont Street — the two-house Greek Revival co-op at the block's Pierrepont corner
• 75 Livingston Street — 1926 office tower converted to a 105-apartment co-op in 1981, at the Downtown seam
• 38 Livingston Street — 24-unit 1914 prewar co-op converted 1986; the smaller-building comparison at the district's eastern edge