Do condo buildings own the retail/ground floor?

The current trend is for the sponsor/developer to keep the retail units, so there's no benefit to the residential owners.

How is that greed? The ground floor retail in a condo is a separate commercial condo and is almost never owned by the condo association. It is often different in a coop.

It would only be greed if the norm is for the condo association to own the retail space and these particular developers decided to break from the norm. However, you are saying that it is common for the retail to not belong to the association, which would mean that it's not greedy. I guess once the developer gets the first set of people to buy it's not their problem anymore. Yet, it makes it a lot more expensive to live in these units. In the case of one apartment that I recently previewed, once the tax abatement runs out, the total monthly carrying cost for a 2 bedroom in the building will be more than I pay in rent for my current 2 bedroom apartment.

This setup is what's known as a "condop." You can read more about them here: http://streeteasy.com/blog/nyc-condops/

A condop is a special case of a condo where the residential space is broken down into coops.

I bought a coop in 1982 on the Upper West Side where the sponsor didn't think to keep the retail space. That became a great source of revenue for the cooperative. It was a blessing to the businesses in the space because there was a cap on how much income the cooperative could get from commercial rentals.

I lived in 2 separate condos where the sponsor kept all the retail space, including the garages. In both cases, they had seats of the Board to represent their commercial interests. Sharing the costs of building maintenance and amenities can get very hairy and cause a lot of disputes. For example, in one condo the sponsor took one of the 2 ground floor apartments and listed it as commercial property in the prospectus. It was not isolated from the infrastructure of the building as the store fronts were, so there were endless disputes over sharing costs, especially when it was discovered that the electricity, water, and heat was hooked into the lobby.

There's one condo, the St. Tropez, where the condo itself owns the commercial space. That's also the oldest condo.

A condo does collect CCs from the commercial units' owner(s), which helps, but it's not nearly as much as the rent the owner is collecting.

With co-ops, the developer or sponsor would achieve the same end by getting a long-term lease from the co-op. A lot of those were later found to be stacked too much in the sponsor's favor, and were thrown out.

A few co-ops have such valuable commercial space that the rents carry almost all the cost of running the building. E.g. the co-op on the east side of Madison from 70th-71st.

The cap on a co-op's commercial income was called the 80/20 rule. In order for shareholders to deduct their share of RE taxes and underlying-mortgage interest, the rents couldn't amount to more than 20% of a co-op's revenue.

That's been changed, so now the rule is that no more than 20% of a co-op's space can be commercial. Big windfall for those co-ops that had to offer bargain rents to keep their commercial income below that 20% threshold.

The new condo at http://streeteasy.com/building/12-east-13-street-new_york is a little unusual. There, the developer is keeping the retail space, 8.6% of the building, but the parking space will be owned by the condo and licensed to the apartment-unit owners. There're only 11 spaces with an automated system, so the developer must've figured they'd jack up sales prices more than they'd be worth as ongoing income.