Meanwhile Back in Florida...

Why am I not surprised by this? The proposed Special Assessment is $80K per unit.
not all are going to swallow that and that is the underlying reason. Money.

In one HOA I was a member of, over 90% of the owners voted for a $30K assessment
for each home (175 homes). A group of 3 held it up in court for over a year and I know
for a fact that at least one of the 3 did it as they could not afford the $33K
and for no other reason.

There are probably plenty more condo owners out there who can't afford their homes, and the fallout from the Surfside collapse will force a reckoning.

I can understand wanting to take a chance if the community is all ranch-style detached homes, but good grief these are more towers needing structural work.

I cannot tell if CathyA3's comment that she is flabbergasted is sarcasm or not.

The article says the recall petition had irregularities. If the group demanding the recall did not use an attorney, then the recall petition being legally defective does not surprise.

Since Surfside condo collapse, I have read of a number of condos that have assessed in the $30k to $100k range, per unit, in the last 15 years or so.

Condo buyers need to get used to this.

A long-time Treasurer-Director at a 30-year-old condo in the town where I live just quit both positions. Incredibly, she explained that the reason she quit was because people fought her even when she recommended assessment increases that were far less than those needed.

The condo's reserves are about 30% funded, well below what is healthy. The former Treasurer-Director does not understand reserve studies. She has publicly belittled their value. But now that the condo is facing roof replacement within a few years and more, and the reserve funds obviously are nowhere near enough, I believe she has had it. She does not want to take the (ignorance-based) hostility for doing the right thing.

I think a board has an absolute duty to grit their teeth, bring on a shark of an attorney, lien and foreclose. Else many other owners are messed over by the minority that cannot pay or get a loan. Oh dear. As soon as the dust settled, if I were on this condo's board, I would feel a duty vote to lien and foreclose on every unit not paying, as quickly as the law permits.

We're not comparing apples to apples. The repairs on many of these condos is more than it originally cost to build back in the day. The cost to maintain or repair a condo versus a town home community versus detached single family homes.

I posted an article of an aging population living in HOA's and, in particular, condos and the effect it has in raising funds to maintain the dwellings. It appeared no one was interested to comment.

Condos - and to some extent HOAs - make this problem even worse because they hide essential components in the common areas and expenses in the assessments, making it much easier to keep kicking the can down the road. If you own a single family home outside of an HOA, you know it if the roof starts to leak or the foundation cracks - the problems are in your face and won't go away.

Compounding this, especially in condos, is that homeowners can stop paying assessments and nothing very terrible happens in the short run. Their financial issues become other people's problem since the essential bills have to be paid *now*.

A similar thing happens with deferred maintenance that results in huge special assessments. While it may seem "unfair" that people are expected to agree to unaffordable assessments, these same people *chose* this by not paying the higher assessments all along and stashing the money in the reserves. They essentially borrowed (and spent) money from their future selves and now the loan has come due. The real problem is that they're allowed to get away with it. The folks who really get stuck are the newer owners who likely paid top dollar for property that was essentially living on borrowed time and was not worth the price they paid.

I agree that this is a problem, and I don't know of many solutions other than ones that prevent or make it much harder to hide the true cost of home ownership or to keep kicking the can down the road.

For example, have stricter requirements about funding the reserves, and eliminate or drastically limit homeowners' ability to vote down assessment increases. And maybe stronger disclosure and lending requirements for condos so that assessments and reserves are in their faces and can't be ignored. This latter may seem unfair to condo buyers, but owners of individual homes don't cause multi-story buildings to collapse and kill a bunch of people.

The problem of elderly folks who can no longer handle home ownership for a variety of reasons is a separate but related issue. It's tough since as a society we tend to agree that adults have the right to make their own choices, even if those choices harm them. The problem in COAs/HOAs is that these choices can also harm neighbors to whom they have financial and legal ties.

I agree that trying to assess the financial and physical health of a condo community is tough and probably beyond the capabilities of most/all buyers. I'm not sure that I could do it, and I'm about as well informed as any outsider could be.

Buying a condo is more akin to buying into a business or even buying shares of stock. People who do this will spend hours pouring over financial statements, auditors' reports, tax filings, etc. or even talking to the other business owners and management in an effort to determine whether or not the investment is worth the risk of buying. In many ways, buying stock is less risky because for most people a single holding doesn't represent the lion's share of their net worth the way a home often does.

But anyway, back to that link I posted, what floored me was that, after the Surfside collapse, anybody living in a 45-year-old tower condo needing structural repairs could even think about putting this off, to the point where they want to get rid of the current board to stop it. You'd think that the collapse and the deaths of many residents would have scared them silly.