Focus 1 Governance Rubric (v1.0) — Residential Community Governance

Focus 1 Governance Rubric

Version: 1.0 Scope: Condominium associations, cooperative corporations, and homeowner associations Status: First published version. Adapted from the operating scoring system used in TASFGA’s founding area of focus, which has been applied at catalogue scale rather than to a sample.

Our Methodology commits each area of focus to define its own rubric — the dimensions scored, the weighting, and the threshold for each grade band — and to version it. This is that document for Focus 1.

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Section 1 — What a rubric has to survive

A governance score is a claim about an entity, published by a party the entity did not choose. It attracts exactly one kind of challenge: you scored us that way because of who we are. A rubric earns the right to be published by making that challenge answerable in advance.

Four properties do that work:

1. One formula, every entity. The same code, the same inputs, the same thresholds, applied without exception. There is no per-entity adjustment and no manual override — not by a researcher, not by a director, not by anyone.
2. Public-record inputs only. Every input is a record a third party can pull and check. Nothing enters the score from private correspondence, an anonymous account, or a researcher’s impression.
3. Severity ordering, not counting. A single condition that endangers a resident must move the score further than a hundred minor administrative findings. A rubric that counts rather than weighs will rank a well-run large entity below a dangerous small one.
4. An error path. A score that cannot be corrected is an assertion. Every scored entity can dispute an input against the record, and a correction that lands is logged publicly under the Corrections Policy.

Section 2 — Normalization

Scores are computed per unit, not per entity. A 700-unit building and a 12-unit building generate incomparable absolute volumes of every public record that exists. Density is the only figure that supports comparison, so violations, fines, and enforcement actions are normalized to a common per-100-unit basis before any threshold is applied.

This is the single most consequential design choice in the rubric. Without it, the largest entities in any sector score worst automatically, which is a measurement of size and not of governance.

Section 3 — The scored dimensions

Each dimension is scored 0–100 and calibrated so that the scale means the same thing everywhere it appears: 50 is meaningfully elevated, 80 or above is severe. A reader can therefore compare a 70 in one dimension against a 70 in another without knowing the underlying unit of measurement.

The dimensions divide into four families:

Habitability and life safety

• Housing-code violations, by class
• Immediately hazardous (highest-class) conditions
• Emergency repair orders executed by the authority and billed back
• Vacate orders in force
• Designation on an official worst-conditions or distressed-buildings register

Structural and capital compliance

• Facade and structural inspection status, including any unsafe determination
• Persistence of protective sheds and sidewalk structures over time
• Energy and emissions compliance against the applicable deadline
• Modeled reserve adequacy, derived from visible capital spending

Enforcement and legal exposure

• Administrative fines and their disposition
• Litigation initiated by the housing authority
• Board-versus-sponsor and repeated owner litigation

Tenure and disclosure exposure

• Regulated-tenancy exposure within the entity
• Liens and encumbrances of record

A scored entity receives both a composite letter and a per-dimension profile. The profile is the more useful artifact: it shows where risk concentrates. An entity can hold a clean habitability record and carry severe capital-compliance exposure, and a single letter conceals exactly that.

Section 4 — Letter bands

Letter	Meaning
A	Well governed. Baseline compliance, no major signals.
B	Mostly compliant. Minor issues only.
C	Compliance gaps. Ongoing concerns, mixed signals.
D	Significant governance failures. Multiple operational concerns.
E	Severe distress. Emergency-level compounding failures.
F	Total failure. A life-safety crisis, or simultaneous collapse across multiple dimensions.

Letters A–E carry a sub-tier of 1–10 marking position within the band. F carries no sub-tier and is reserved for a life-safety crisis — an active vacate order, or an equivalent condition — or for multi-dimension collapse with no visible recovery path. An entity cannot reach F on administrative findings alone, however numerous.

The letter is assigned from normalized density and then shifted by discrete governance triggers. The triggers are public flags anyone can look up: designation on a worst-conditions register, an active vacate order, repeated highest-class violations, judgments obtained by the housing authority, live high-severity structural violations not dismissed on appeal, an unsafe facade determination, energy-compliance failure, and liens of record.

Section 5 — Classifying expenditure

Capital and operating outflow is classified into four buckets, on whether the work was required, added value, or is explained by neither:

• Required — mandated by statute or code: facade compliance, emissions compliance, life-safety systems. Non-discretionary. Not a finding.
• Value-add — capital improvement that creates or preserves value for members: building systems, envelope, common areas. Not a finding.
• Discretionary-opaque — post-occupancy spending attributable to neither a legal mandate nor an identifiable reinvestment. The residual category.
• Enforcement cost — fines imposed by the authority, and emergency repairs the authority performed and billed back. These are the price of governance failure, not investment in the asset.

The reported figure is discretionary-opaque plus enforcement cost. It is stated as a measurement of spending that is not explained by the record, and it is not an allegation of misappropriation. An entity with a complete answer to it has a complete answer; the rubric’s position is that no member currently has any way to ask.

Section 6 — Bias controls

• No neighbourhood weighting. No adjustment for borough, district, median income, or property value. Two entities with identical records receive identical scores wherever they sit.
• No ownership-type adjustment. Condominiums and cooperatives are scored identically. Sponsor-controlled and member-controlled entities face the same thresholds.
• No age penalty. An entity is scored on its current record, not on its year of construction. Where an older entity scores worse, the violations move the letter, not the age. Age-cohort comparison appears as context and does not affect the grade.
• No editorial override. No researcher, officer, or director can change a computed score by hand.
• Dismissal-aware. Where a high-severity violation was dismissed on appeal, the dismissal is honoured. Issuance volume is reported as context; a clean dismissal is not scored as a failure. An entity whose enforcement record is entirely dismissed is not penalised for having been accused.
• Absence is a finding, and it is disclosed as one. Where a dataset returns nothing for an entity, that silence is logged in a coverage ledger rather than scored as a clean result. The entity may be clean, or the dataset may not reach it. The output states which, and never lets the second read as the first.

Section 7 — What this rubric does not measure

Stated plainly, because a score that overclaims its scope is worse than no score:

• Interior condition. The inputs describe common areas and building systems. They do not reach inside a member’s unit unless a complaint was filed.
• Financial health. Reserve adequacy is modeled from visible capital spending, because audited financial statements are not public records in New York. It is a floor estimate, not a measurement. Where actual statements are obtainable, they are reviewed separately under Audit & Financial Records Review, which is not part of this score.
• Governance conduct. Whether meetings are held, minutes distributed, elections run fairly, records retained, or conflicts managed. None of it appears in any public dataset, which is why TASFGA maintains review practices as a separate instrument. The rubric measures the residue that governance failure leaves in public records; the review practices go at the failure directly.
• Service quality. Responsiveness, communication, and member satisfaction are unmeasured. An entity whose manager resolves problems before they become violations scores better, and that is intended — but it is an inference from an absence, not an observation.
• Market value. The rubric scores governance and compliance. It says nothing about price, yield, or whether an entity is a good place to live.

Section 8 — Calibration constants, and why they are withheld

Everything above is published: the dimensions, the inputs behind each, the normalization basis, the severity ordering, the trigger list, the band definitions, the classifier, and the bias controls. A third party can reconstruct the rubric’s logic and check any input against the record.

Three quantities are not published: the composite weights, the density boundaries that map a number to a letter, and the per-dimension calibration constants.

This is a real exception to our published-methodology commitment and it should be read as one. The reason is gaming: an entity that knows the exact boundary between two letters can manage its record to the boundary rather than manage the conditions, and the scores of every other entity degrade as a result. We judge that a rubric whose logic is public and whose constants are held produces more accountability than one whose constants are public and whose scores are therefore worthless.

The exception carries obligations, and they bind us rather than the scored entity:

1. Every input to every score remains individually disputable against the public record, and a correction that lands is applied and logged.
2. The constants are held by TASFGA, not by any scored entity, vendor, or funder, and no scored entity is told its distance from a band boundary.
3. Any change to the constants moves the version number, re-scores every affected entity, and is logged in the corrections and changes ledger — the same as a change to any published element.
4. The exception is itself reviewable. If the Accountability Council, once seated, concludes the constants should be published, they will be.

Section 9 — Versioning

This is v1.0. When any published element changes, the version moves and every affected entity is re-scored — a rubric that is quietly edited under a stable version number is the failure mode this document exists to prevent. Prior versions remain accessible, and the version that produced any given score appears alongside it.

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Adapted for TASFGA from the operating scoring system in TASFGA’s founding area of focus. The in-field application, building by building, is published at condoscoopsnyc.org.