Why there are two chapters, in the Governor's own words

Approval Memorandum No. 9, accompanying Chapter 578, explains the deal — and it is worth quoting because it names associations expressly:

“This bill would require sellers of real property, as well as condominiums, cooperatives and homeowners associations, to remove discriminatory restrictive covenants from their properties. Under longstanding state and federal law, such covenants are illegal and unenforceable where they remain in property deeds or other recorded documents. Historically, discriminatory restrictive covenants were used in the private market to limit a property's sale or usage based on the characteristics of prospective buyers or occupants, such as their race or ethnicity.

I strongly support removing these vestiges of illegal and pernicious discrimination. However, the bill requires technical changes for clarity and to require removal of discriminatory covenants concerning any protected class covered by the State's Human Rights Law.

I have reached an agreement with the Legislature to enact these changes in the upcoming legislative session. On the basis of this agreement, I am pleased to sign this bill into law.”³

The agreement was honoured within ten weeks, by S8760 / A9499.⁴ And note what the condition did: boards got a broader duty, not a narrower one. The Governor's technical fix widened the trigger class.

What a board actually has to do

Four steps, and none of them is difficult once someone owns the task:

1. Pull every recorded document. The declaration, every recorded amendment, any recorded rules, and for an older community the original subdivision map and any developer-era covenants that run with the land. This is county-clerk work, and in a community formed before 1968 it may reach back further than the current board has ever looked.

2. Have counsel read them against Executive Law § 296(5). The obvious candidates — race, religion, national origin — are the reason the statute exists, and in a pre-1950 New York community they are genuinely common. But the Human Rights Law reaches further, and the categories most likely to surprise a board are the ones that read as ordinary occupancy rules rather than as discrimination: restrictions framed around who may occupy a unit, around family composition, or around source of income. Our New York governing statute page covers how a declaration is structured.

3. Adopt a board resolution deleting or amending them. No owner meeting, no supermajority, no proxy campaign. The statute removes that requirement for this purpose.

4. Record it before June 3, 2027. The statute's seller provision describes the instrument: a “restrictive covenant modification document, which shall be available from the county recorder.” And for a seller, at least, there is a fee break — “such seller shall not be required to pay filing fees for the recording of the restrictive covenant modification document.”

What the statute does not say, and we are not going to invent

There is no penalty. The section specifies no fine, no enforcement mechanism against a board that misses the deadline, and no allocation of cost. Anyone telling a board it faces a specific penalty should be asked where in § 327-a it appears.

That does not make the deadline safe to ignore. A board that has been told in a statute to remove a discriminatory covenant, and has not, is in a materially worse position if the covenant is ever raised in a fair-housing complaint — and New York State and City human rights enforcement is independent of anything in this section. Our fining authority page covers the enforcement side of governing documents generally.

The individual owner's self-help route

A separate route exists, and it means an owner does not have to wait for the board. Subdivision 5:

“Any person holding an ownership interest in real property that such person believes is subject to an unlawful restriction may record a restrictive covenant modification document pursuant to subdivision two of this section. Such recording shall include a complete copy of the original document containing the unlawful restriction with the unlawful restriction stricken and shall be signed under penalty of law.”

An owner acting unilaterally, on their own reading of what is unlawful, signing under penalty of law. A board that has not done its own review may find a modification document recorded against the community's chain of title by someone else.

One provision that was taken away

Chapter 43 of 2026 deleted a subdivision from the original chapter that had provided that a recorded modification, subject to later-recorded covenants, “shall be deemed the only restrictions having effect on the property.” That is gone from the current section. A modification no longer supersedes everything else recorded against the property — which is the right outcome, since the earlier version would have let a single modification document wipe out an entire declaration.

The seller duty, for completeness

Subdivision 2 sits alongside the board duty and reaches every residential sale in New York:

“If any unlawful restrictions exist in a document to be recorded, any seller shall: (a) have such unlawful restrictions removed from such document by submitting a restrictive covenant modification document, which shall be available from the county recorder, either with the deed for recording, or separately; (b) provide the purchaser or title insurance applicant with a copy of the appropriate restrictive covenant modification document prior to or at the closing of title; and (c) record the restrictive covenant modification document…”

For a board, that has a practical consequence beyond the board's own duty: unit and lot sales in the community will start generating these documents individually, at closings, whether or not the association has acted. A board that completes its own review produces one clean recorded instrument for the whole community. A board that does not gets a patchwork. Our estoppel and resale page covers what an association is asked for at closing.

Why almost nobody has told your board about this

The duty arrived in the third subdivision of a section whose headline purpose is a seller obligation, in a chapter signed in December, modified by a second chapter in February, with an effective date computed 180 days out. It is not in the Condominium Act and not in the Not-for-Profit Corporation Law. It is the kind of provision that reaches boards through their counsel or not at all — and the deadline is nine months away.