Living
Banning smoking in apartments, condos
What every association and owner should know
(Washington Blade photo by Phil Reese)
By DAVID A. RAHNIS
Many urban dwellers are waking up to the concerns surrounding secondhand smoke in their apartment cooperatives and condo buildings. To date, approximately half of all states (including D.C.) have passed comprehensive smoke-free laws. However, these laws typically exempt a person’s home. There is no effort on the horizon to ban smoking in all multiple family dwellings in D.C. This situation could create a dilemma for non-smokers trying to coexist with smokers in a residential environment. Nationwide, the number of residential buildings becoming voluntarily smoke-free appears to be growing.
The secondhand smoke issue is usually raised when a resident complains about the smell of smoke entering his or her apartment from other apartments or areas within the building. Attempting to address those complaints, building management will often undertake an investigation or some corrective action to address the smoke odors. Often, these initial efforts may fall short and residents will contend that only a full building-wide smoking ban can resolve the problem.
The first step for any coop or condo when facing this issue is to review the building’s governing documents for any provisions pertaining to smoking. If a board determines a smoking ban to be in the best interest of the building, the most effective way to do so is through an amendment to the governing documents. For example, in the cooperative setting, an amendment to the Proprietary Lease and/or By-Laws is the most effective means of enforcing a ban. Residents should examine the procedures and voting requirements necessary to amend the governing documents. In the cooperative setting, the most appropriate venue for obtaining shareholder consent would be a special meeting of the shareholders, held in accordance with the by-laws. A court is more likely to uphold a smoking restriction adopted by a supermajority of apartment owners rather than by simple board action.
At this point, there is only one local case involving smoking in the cooperative environment. In David Schuman v. Greenbelt Homes, Inc. (a 2011 Prince George’s County, Md. Circuit Court case now on appeal), a non-smoking cooperative townhouse owner sued building management and his neighbor on the grounds that secondhand smoke from his neighbor violated the nuisance clause of his mutual ownership contract. The non-smoking owner claimed that he suffered from coughing, sneezing, congestion and watery eyes for years due to the secondhand smoke. In an attempt to alleviate the problem, the management company caulked around baseboards, plumbing and electrical outlets in both homes. Such efforts did not satisfy the non-smoking owner.
However, the Circuit Court ruled in favor of the management company, noting that “not all nuisances are necessarily actionable” and that the matter was more appropriate for the state legislature. The court found that the level of smoke entering the non-smoker’s townhouse constituted merely an offensive odor and did not trigger an actionable nuisance. The court said that the plaintiff needed to demonstrate “real injury” such as an “unfavorable health condition”. In addition, the court found no bad faith in the management company’s handling of the non-smoker’s complaints.
While a significant body of legal analysis does not yet exist in the D.C. area, courts in other jurisdictions have already begun addressing and analyzing the issues surrounding community smoking bans. The underlying conclusion is that boards and managers need to be alert to secondhand smoke complaints because cooperatives and condos can be held legally accountable for failing to address smoking-related concerns.
A 2006 New York civil court case addressed the potential for landlord liability due to secondhand smoke. In Poyck v. Bryant, the court found that tenants who vacated a condominium apartment before the lease termination date due to secondhand smoke from an adjoining apartment could assert the “warranty of habitability” as a defense to their landlord’s nonpayment of rent proceeding, notwithstanding the fact that the landlord had no control over the adjoining apartment. The court held that a sufficiently egregious secondhand smoke condition presents health hazards so as to invoke the warranty of habitability, and that the landlord had the power to act against the smoking neighbor.
In Christiansen v. Heritage Hills 1 Condominium Owners Association, a Colorado district court in 2006 upheld an amendment to a condominium declaration that banned smoking inside apartments. The court noted that the board had already tried, unsuccessfully, to address secondhand smoke through various remediation measures.
The New York County Supreme Court in Reinhard v. Connaught Tower Corporation ruled in 2011 that coop boards are required to act reasonably when residents complain that secondhand smoke is infiltrating their apartments from other parts of the building. In this case, the plaintiff-owner of a coop apartment sued the corporation because she detected a strong smell of cigarette smoke in her apartment. She was told by the managing agent and the superintendent to re-caulk the floor, molding and faceplates in her bedroom, which did not eliminate the odor. The board, however, refused to take any action and disclaimed any responsibility for the problem. Plaintiff then sued the corporation for breach of the warranty of habitability, breach of fiduciary duty and constructive eviction among other causes of action. The court held that the secondhand smoke in plaintiff’s apartment breached the warranty of habitability and as a result constituted a constructive eviction. Furthermore, the court determined that the co-op breached plaintiff’s proprietary lease by failing and refusing to take any “reasonable steps” to alleviate the secondhand smoke problem.
If a cooperative apartment or condo community is experiencing an increasing number of secondhand smoke complaints and if remediation efforts have been unsuccessful, the Board should consider a building wide smoking ban. In addition to a “town hall” style meeting, the Board’s next step might be to conduct a formal survey of apartment owners in order to determine the most feasible course of action for the community. If the survey results reveal that a full and immediate smoking ban is not appropriate, the building can implement a modified form of smoking ban. For example, the ban could be delayed for a certain period of time (e.g., two or three years) in order to allow owners/residents time to comply with the new rules. Alternatively, current smokers could be “grandfathered” out of an immediate smoking ban. At the same time, the building could begin to reject any prospective purchasers who smoke. In this manner, through gradual attrition, the building would eventually become entirely smoke free. Owners and boards would be wise to consult management and legal advice when facing these issues to avoid expensive litigation or claims of discrimination down the road.
This is a part of a series of monthly articles by Jackson & Campbell, P.C. on legal issues of interest to the LGBT community. Jackson & Campbell, P.C. is a full service law firm based in Washington with offices in Maryland and Virginia. Those with questions regarding this article, please contact David Rahnis at 202-457-1673 or [email protected]. Those with questions regarding the firm should contact Don Uttrich, who chairs its Diversity Committee, at 202-457-4266 or [email protected].
Real Estate
With gas prices soaring again, a staycation is a good plan
Home can be your personal retreat and your own private resort
When airfare costs more than your monthly utility bill and a weekend road trip requires a second mortgage just to fill the gas tank, many homeowners are discovering an unexpected luxury: the staycation.
A staycation isn’t settling for less—it’s reaping the benefits of one of the biggest investments you can make: your home. Much more than a place to sleep, it’s your personal retreat, your gathering place and, with a little preparation, your very own private resort.
Whether you own a single-family home, a townhouse, or a condo, creating a memorable staycation starts with appreciating what made you fall in love with your property in the first place.
Start with a home refresh. Think about checking into a beautiful vacation rental. It’s spotless, organized, and inviting. You can recreate that same feeling by spending a day preparing your home before your staycation officially begins.
Clear away clutter, deep clean the bathrooms and kitchen, wash the windows, and put fresh linens on every bed – even if you’re not expecting guests. Fluff the pillows, light a favorite candle, and place fresh flowers on the table. These small touches instantly make your home feel more luxurious.
If your budget allows, hiring a professional cleaning service can be one of the best staycation perquisites you make. After all, vacation should begin the moment you wake up and not after you’ve spent the day scrubbing floors.
Treat your staycation like a real trip. Set away messages on your phone and out of office notices on your email. Skip unnecessary chores for a few days. Giving yourself permission to relax may be the most valuable part of the entire experience.
One of the greatest advantages homeowners have over travelers is private outdoor living space. Whether it’s a spacious backyard, a screened porch, a rooftop terrace, or a cozy condo balcony, these areas can become the centerpiece of your staycation.
Stringing lights and adding comfortable seating, colorful planters, and outdoor rugs can completely transform the atmosphere without spending thousands of dollars. Add a portable fire pit, a tabletop fountain, or a hammock, and suddenly your backyard starts competing with many resorts.
Host an evening cookout, organize a game night, invite neighbors over for dessert, or gather around the fire pit for conversation after sunset. These simple moments often become the memories we treasure most.
Inside, transform your family room into a home theater complete with popcorn and comfortable blankets. Turn your breakfast room into a morning coffee café. Designate a quiet reading corner where phones are prohibited. Create a spa-like bathroom with plush towels, candles, bath salts, and relaxing music.
One of the highlights of traveling is experiencing new food. Instead of dining out every night, create themed dinners inspired by your favorite destinations. Prepare homemade Italian pasta one evening, Caribbean grilled seafood another, or a backyard Texas barbecue over the weekend. For a touch of whimsy, dress the part.
Pair each meal with music and libations from the region and enjoy dinner outdoors whenever possible. Suddenly, your dining room becomes part of the vacation experience instead of just another place to eat.
Families with children can turn a staycation into an adventure by seeing their home through a child’s eyes. Set up a backyard camping experience with a tent, flashlights, and s’mores around the fire pit. Transform the living room into an indoor campground complete with sleeping bags and a movie under a blanket “fort.” Organize a backyard Olympics with relay races, water balloon tosses, scavenger hunts, or miniature golf using household items.
Encourage children to plan a family picnic in the backyard or on the patio, choose a theme for a movie marathon, or help prepare meals inspired by countries they’d like to visit someday. The goal is to create experiences your children will remember long after summer is over.
Enjoy the amenities you already pay for. Condominium communities and many planned neighborhoods offer amenities that residents often overlook.
Swimming pools, fitness centers, tennis and pickleball courts, walking trails, clubhouses, grilling stations, and community gardens are designed to enhance your lifestyle. During your staycation, make a point of exploring everything your community offers. You may discover you’ve been living beside your own private resort all along.
Real estate professionals often talk about resale value, appreciation, and return on investment. While those things certainly matter, there’s another return that’s harder to measure: the enjoyment you get from living in your home every day.
You don’t need a boarding pass to recharge. You don’t need a hotel reservation to make memories. Sometimes the perfect getaway is the one you already own.
Valerie M. Blake is a licensed Associate Broker in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia with RLAH @properties. Call or text her at 202-246-8602, email her at [email protected] or follow her on Facebook at TheRealst8ofAffairs.
The latest Honda Civic hatchback and Subaru Impreza are two of the segment’s stars. Both offer sensible pricing, excellent utility and enough personality to avoid feeling like appliances.
The Civic is more polished. The Impreza, more rugged. Luckily, neither is trying to be obnoxiously flashy.
HONDA CIVIC
$28,000
MPG: 30 city/38 highway
0 to 60 mph: 8.9 seconds
Cargo space: 24.5 cu. ft.
PROS: Fuel efficient. Spacious cargo area. Good resale value.
CONS: No all-wheel drive. Fussy infotainment. Low rear headroom.
WHAT’S NEW: Only minor updates for 2026. The biggest change carries over from last year’s refresh: the addition of the hybrid, which has become a star performer.
The Honda Civic hatchback won’t scream for attention. It won’t arrive wearing sequins and carrying a smoke machine. It’s more like Nomi Marks from “Sense8”: intelligent, sophisticated and impressively capable.
The styling remains handsome and clean. Long hood. Low roofline. Crisp lines everywhere.Honda resisted the urge to make this vehicle look like a spaceship or an angry robot. That’s refreshing.
Inside, the dashboard is simple and elegant. The honeycomb air-vent treatment remains one of the coolest interior details in the segment. Materials feel expensive. Controls are easy to understand. And visibility is excellent.
I love how the cargo space is generous, with rear seats that fold flat. A bicycle, several suitcases or enough supplies for an ambitious weekend road trip fit without much hassle.
Then there’s the hybrid. The system produces a healthy amount of power while delivering fuel economy that borders on the absurd. Around town, handling feels smooth, quiet and surprisingly quick. You almost glide through traffic. The standard gasoline engine isn’t bad, but the hybrid is stellar.
The Civic also shines on twisty roads. Steering is precise. Body motions stay controlled. The suspension strikes a sweet balance between comfort and sportiness.
Biggest weakness? No all-wheel drive. For drivers in snowy climates, that’s not so good.
Still, the Civic’s stellar combination of efficiency, quality, and driving enjoyment remains incredibly hard to beat.
SUBARU IMPREZA
$27,000
MPG: 27 city/33 highway
0 to 60 mph: 8.5 seconds
Cargo space: 20.4 cubic feet
PROS: All-wheel drive. User-friendly tech. Safety cred.
CONS: No hybrid version. Some road noise. Modest cargo room.
WHAT’S NEW: The Impreza receives relatively minor updates for 2026. Subaru continues refining this hatchback rather than reinventing it.
If the Honda Civic is urbane, the Subaru Impreza is unfussy. There’s a kind of Kristen Stewart energy here. Cool without trying too hard.
The styling isn’t dramatic, but it works. This hauler appears ready to tackle rain, snow, dirt roads or an impromptu weekend escape.
And all-wheel drive comes standard on every Impreza. (Most competitors only offer front-wheel drive or include all-wheel drive as a pricey option.)
The result: Slippery roads simply don’t create much anxiety. The suspension absorbs bumps nicely. Long trips are comfortable. Visibility is great, thanks to relatively thin roof pillars and large windows.
I like how the cabin is functional rather than fancy. Materials don’t quite match the Civic’s upscale vibe, but everything feels sturdy. A large infotainment screen dominates the dashboard and generally works well, though some drivers may prefer more physical buttons.
Cargo space is respectable, and the design makes loading bulky items easy.
Performance depends heavily on trim. The base engine gets the job done, but nobody will confuse it for a sports car. The RS trim’s larger engine provides more power and makes the ride livelier. But even then, acceleration remains merely adequate.
The Impreza’s real appeal lies elsewhere, with a mix that few rivals can match: hatchback practicality, standard all-wheel drive, strong safety scores and reasonable pricing.
Perhaps that’s the key difference between these two hatchbacks. The Honda Civic impresses immediately. The Subaru Impreza grows on you.
Fortunately, choosing between them is less stressful than deciding who gets the last mimosa at brunch.
Real Estate
When buying a home, it’s decisions, decisions, decisions
Keeping notes on the process makes for an informed purchase
When looking to buy a home, there are lots of details to consider. Many of my clients would come to me and say, “Joe I want to buy a place, but I haven’t decided which neighborhood to buy in.” And the struggle was real. A few clients had everything decided from the color of the hallway walls to the cabinet handles and sometimes which three square blocks they wanted to look at.
But other clients were occasionally looking at properties in areas as distinct as Union Market/NOMA, Brookland, Logan Circle, and then we would even go across the river to look at a property in Shirlington or the Van Dorn areas of Virginia, which all have their own unique flavor and characteristics.
Sometimes clients would tell me, “I only want to look in Mount Pleasant or Adams Morgan.” Or, “don’t even show me any properties west of this street or south of that street.” My job wasn’t to convince people where to live. It was to just take the parameters they set for me and find as good of a property in that zone as I could, coordinate the showings and, if necessary, offer the strategy.
One can see that buyers often had more decisions to make than a seller. From a seller’s perspective, the house was where it was, and we just had to make the best of it. But working with a buyer could mean looking at five different neighborhoods, and then being a “thought partner” to help them figure out which were the top two or three areas they had seen, and then further distilling those down into what was available and weighing those options against each other.
One house could have the dream bathroom but also be located six blocks further from a Metro stop, walkable shopping and dining, and “just too far away from my friends.” Another house could have all the neighborhood options a client was looking for, but was just not in turnkey condition, and would require an additional $30,000 of upgrades once purchased to make it into the dream home they envisioned.
One activity I often asked buyers to do was to keep an active list in their heads of the properties they liked, and to keep a running rank of the top three. I often encouraged them to bring a notebook along on the journey where they could take notes and write down questions they thought of as they looked. It was an important decision, and sometimes the largest purchase of their lives. Why not take it a little seriously, and take notes? This could often help the buyer later when they felt it was time to decide.
The point here is, keeping a notebook handy can sometimes help a person with what feels like an overwhelming process. It provides a space to explore how one feels, jot down important details to remember, and then use that to make an informed decision.
Joseph Hudson is a referral agent with RLAH. Reach him at 703-587-0597 or [email protected].
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