The condominium apartment owners of the Ariel West, the 32-story building at Broadway and 99th Street, voted 47 to 3 late last month to ban smoking in the building's apartments, according to an article by Vivian S. Toy in the May 15, 2011 edition of The New York Times. There are 68 owners in total; 46 votes constituted the supermajority required to change the bylaws.

"Even smokers who moved into the building before the ban must abide by it. The building is one of the first in the city to approve such an extensive ban. (Several rental buildings introduced bans last year, but established tenants who smoked were not affected)," the article said.

"Even though people bought into this building thinking they could smoke," said Gideon Stein, the president of the condo board at Ariel West, the article said, "people do not have a constitutional right to smoke."

"That said, the three-year-old building is not about to become a police state. Enforcement will be complaint-driven, and no one will be knocking on doors or sniffing out smokers. Smoking could, however, quickly become an extremely expensive habit, since the first complaint will draw a $150 fine, and the fine for each succeeding complaint will increase by $150," the article continued.

"The idea," the article said, "is obviously a controversial one," said Bruce Littlefield, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the building and who voted for the ban, "because people's domain is their home, and they certainly should be able to enjoy what they do within the walls of their home. But sometimes what people do seeps outside their walls and into other people's environment, and it becomes a quality-of-life issue." Even though it was not so long ago that airplanes still had smoking sections, he added, "smokers know not to ask anymore, 'Can I smoke in your house?' That's so last decade."

Mr. Stein first floated the idea of a smoking ban two years ago. There was substantial support for it, but he did not pursue it because he knew that passing it would require a building-wide campaign.

"None of the apartments are investor owned," the article said, "and no one expressed concerns that a ban might hurt property values or make it difficult to sell an apartment. On the contrary, most people thought it might enhance values. But there were residents who thought the ban would intrude on individual liberties."

Noel Labat-Comess said he voted against the ban because he thought it was too simplistic and did not address the needs of current owners who might be smokers. "I'm not a smoker and I don't like smoking," he said, "but it is legal, and people have a right to smoke in their homes." Someone who bought an apartment at the height of the market could now be faced with having to move and sell at a loss, he added.

But Eva C. Talel, the condo board's lawyer, said: "Nobody is forced to do anything here, and if you don't like the new rule, part of what you do when you buy into a community is you buy into a set of rules that could change if a sufficient number of your neighbors want them to. The building has change built into the system."

The fact that the Ariel West is made up mainly of family-sized apartments with three or more bedrooms, and that it has more than 100 children under 16, probably helped make the ban easier to pass.