Questions Madison owners, boards, tenants and businesses bring to us, together with ones raised in Habitat magazine, Brick Underground, the ButterflyMX repair guide and the city's own rules, answered for the apartment houses and homes here.
Apartment houses from 1928 to 1941
Our building went up in the 1930s, before the intercom rule, but it has had an intercom for as long as anyone remembers. Can the owner simply let it die?
Not safely. The 1968 line in Multiple Dwelling Law §50-a decides when an older building must install an intercom, but once a building has one, Habitat's February 2024 article states that the city's Housing Maintenance Code "also requires a functioning intercom," and that courts have treated failing to maintain it as a breach of the warranty of habitability. In a building of eight or more apartments, tenants occupying a majority can also make the door and intercom mandatory by asking in writing.
For an owner, the practical question is cost, not whether. A building whose intercom still works for most apartments is usually the cheapest kind to fix, because its riser can be tested line by line and only the failures replaced. Waiting until it is dead everywhere removes that option.
In our building some apartments can hear the visitor but the visitor cannot hear them, and two floors get no call at all. Does that mean the whole system has to go?
Not by itself. One-way audio and dead floors are different faults. The ButterflyMX repair guide says "No audio or one-way audio may point to an apartment station, audio path, connection, or shared-equipment fault," so a handful of apartments with one-way audio can be bad handsets or bad connections at the terminal board. Two whole floors with no call usually means the riser has failed or been cut at a junction between those floors and the rest of the building.
We test every apartment line from the cellar and ring every apartment from the lobby, and the results usually separate the two. If the riser can be repaired at one junction and the bad handsets replaced, that is the repair. If lines are failing on every floor in different ways, that is when a new system, often on whatever lines still pass, becomes the better value.
Now and then the lobby buzzer goes off by itself and keeps sounding. What is usually behind that?
Usually the lobby, not the apartments. The ButterflyMX guide notes that continuous buzzing "may indicate a stuck button or another entry-panel issue." In an old panel, a button whose contacts have worn or corroded, or water that has got behind the faceplate, can hold a call open. A short on one apartment's line can cause the same symptom, which is why we test the lines as well as the panel.
If it happens after rain, the panel's seal and mounting are the first suspects. If it happens at random, a failing button or controller is more likely. Either way, the answer often turns out to be one part rather than a new system, and that is what we price first.
Each apartment handset in our building is wired with three conductors and a ground. Is that enough for a video system?
It can be. The Forest Hills co-op Habitat wrote about in 2019 had exactly that, three wires per apartment plus a ground, and its new video system needed four wires per line, two for video and two for sound. Some systems run voice, video, power and release on a single pair, which a three-conductor line can carry with a conductor to spare. Others need more.
The answer for your building comes from testing: how many conductors actually reach each apartment, whether each one is continuous and free of shorts, and how long the runs are. Once we know that, we choose the family of equipment the riser can support, and the written price names any apartment line that needs new cable.
Habitat reported that a Forest Hills co-op paid about $130,000 to put video on its old copper for 288 apartments. What does that tell a Madison building a sixth that size?
Mostly that reusing sound wire keeps a large retrofit affordable, not what your building will cost. That figure works out to roughly $450 per apartment, close to the "around $500 per apartment" for video in large buildings that Brick Underground attributes to the New York Times. A Madison building of forty-five or fifty apartments has the same kind of riser and the same choice.
On our Brooklyn list, a full entry system with a panel and an answering point for every apartment starts at about $2,500 and runs past $10,000 for larger buildings. Where a Madison building lands depends on the test results, whether residents want video, wall stations, phone answering or a mix, and what the lobby door needs.
Tenants, boards and the paperwork
Openigloo lists open HPD violations for our building but does not say what they are. How can we tell whether one concerns the intercom or the entrance door?
HPD publishes the violation records for every building it inspects, and each record carries a description, the class and the dates. Intercom and buzzer violations usually name the intercom, the bell or the return buzzer; entrance-door violations use wording like the one Lucid Rents reproduces for Brooklyn buildings: "ARRANGE AND MAKE SELF-CLOSING THE DOORS AT BUILDING ENTRANCE AT PUBLIC HALL, 1st STORY." Class A violations, the kind Openigloo shows for some Madison buildings, are the least serious category, but they still have to be corrected.
If you find one that concerns the intercom or the street door, send us its description, class and date with your request, because the correction deadline shapes the schedule, and a door-closing violation often means the closer has to be part of the job.
Our managing agent says the call box in the lobby dials each apartment's landline, and most of us have dropped our landlines. What are the options?
Three, and buildings often combine them. The call box's directory can be updated so it dials residents' cell phones instead, which costs least but depends on residents keeping their numbers current. The call box can be replaced with a panel that calls residents through an app over the internet, which adds video but may carry a monthly fee. Or wired stations can be added in the apartments, if the building still has a riser, so the door reaches every apartment regardless of phones.
Habitat's 2017 report describes telephone-based systems as needing a dedicated phone line and offering no video, which is often why buildings that have one start looking for alternatives. We test whatever riser remains before recommending a choice, because a building with good old lines has a cheaper path to wired stations than one without.
Habitat quoted a lawyer saying a broken intercom "could be a defense in court" for a co-op shareholder. Does that mean we can stop paying maintenance until it is fixed?
That is a legal question for a real estate attorney, not for an installer, and Habitat presented it as a possible defense if a co-op sues for nonpayment, not as advice to withhold. What we can say is that the dispute usually ends the same way, with the intercom repaired or replaced, and that the shareholders and the board both benefit from getting there quickly.
If your board is deciding what to do, we can test the system and give the board a written report and price it can circulate to shareholders, so the conversation moves from whether to fix it to how.
Houses on the side streets
Our two-family brick house has two front doors next to each other, one for each apartment. Do we need two separate buzzer systems?
Usually two simple ones, one per door. Each door gets its own one-button station, each apartment its own answering station, and each door its own strike, so a visitor at the upstairs door can only ring and be released into the upstairs apartment, and the same for the ground floor. The two systems can share a power supply in the basement if the owner prefers, on a circuit the owner controls.
If the house has a single shared hall behind one of the doors, or the owner wants to answer both doors from the ground floor, a single system with two door stations can do it. We ask who uses which door before deciding, because a system that lets one household release the other's door is rarely what anyone wants.
Our tenant on the second floor uses the same front door as we do, and the stairs start right inside, beside our own apartment door. Can their button release only the street door?
Yes. The release opens only the door with the strike, which is the street door. Your apartment door, off the hall, stays on its own lock and is not connected to the system at all. The tenant can talk to a visitor and let them into the hall, and the visitor goes straight up the stairs.
If you would rather your ground-floor apartment door also had a buzzer, so you can let in your own visitors to the hall and then to your apartment, it can have one, but it should be a separate station that only you can release. We would not wire your apartment door to the tenant's button.
