Posted:
-- Florida has 1.5 million residential condo units.
-- 918,000 of these units are over 30 years old.
-- The article focuses on condos in the Miami, Florida area.
-- Excerpts:
many towers were thrown up during the boom years, when oversight was lax, developers were incentivized to prize speed over attention to detail and every permit was a rubber stamp away. Even in the most rigorously built structures, secured to the face of the earth by heavy pylons driven through yards of shifting sand, the coastal environment has inevitably taken its toll. Facades are pitted by the salt and sea air. Balconies are crumbling. Pool decks are spidered with cracks. And water — and rising sea levels — are a fact of life. Water on the roads, water slopping up and out of the drains, water in subterranean garages and the very foundations of condo towers packed with hundreds of residents who are frequently blind to the dangers that lie underfoot or, more tragic still, unable to fund the repairs that could save their lives.
And time is running out. “It is a ticking-clock scenario,” Eric Glazer, a veteran condo-law specialist told me. “A bomb got set off, back in the day, and it’s about to go off.”
...
[Post-1961] in their rush to meet demand, developers often cut corners when it came to construction materials or the all-important substructures that kept buildings stuck to the ground — a hazard given the frequency of violent storms on the Florida coast. “It was the wild, wild West,” a longtime Miami engineer named Eugenio Santiago told me. “You had ground being broken every day, and the permitting people were completely overwhelmed. They’d review the calculations you submitted, and they tried to catch things, but stuff was always going to slip through the cracks. Then you’d have the guys who’d just take a glimpse and rub their hands on the paper, sign it and hand it back.” (Santiago’s account is supported by a contemporary interview with a retired building official who told The Miami Herald that a lot of inspection practices in the boom years were “a fiasco, a joke” and not “worth a damn.”)
...
In 1974, a grand jury empaneled by Miami-Dade County reviewed complaints from residents about the quality of local construction and returned with an indictment of the overly friendly relationship between many developers and municipal officials — and the political pressure being exerted on code inspectors. Local leaders, the report warned, “must wake up to the fact that Building Departments are to be established for the protection of the consumer and not solely to bring revenue to the City and County.” Two grand-jury investigations followed, in 1976 and 1990, each more damning than the last. (The 1990 report, the most strident in tone, included an account of a woman who complained about incessant leaks, until one afternoon the entire roof collapsed.) Record-keeping was lax to nonexistent, the juries found; as for the inspectors, they were often unqualified and just as often conspicuously lazy — some had conducted drive-by “inspections” without ever leaving their cars.
It wasn’t until Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, which killed 61 people and destroyed billions of dollars of property, that lawmakers were jolted into forming a governmental panel, the Lewis Commission, to investigate building practices in the state. “The history of Florida mirrors the history of America, in the sense that you can look back and see all these obvious problems that no one is paying attention to because they have dollar signs in their eyes,” Kleinberg, the historian, said of the commission. “Then a tragedy happens, and someone comes in and fixes it.” The commission later issued nearly 100 recommendations on strengthening local building codes. Among them: state-mandated structural analyses of any tower or complex more than 40 years old.
A 40-year recertification program, which had been in place in Miami-Dade County since the mid-1970s, was later adopted by Broward County, a coastal area that encompasses Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood. There is little doubt the policies have made Florida safer. But it has also explicitly placed the burden and responsibilities of the maintenance of older buildings onto owners themselves — with predictable results. “Look, maintenance takes effort, right?” says Allyn Kilsheimer, the engineer hired by Surfside to investigate the Champlain collapse. “And then it costs money to hire an engineer to conduct the re-inspection in the first place, and then it can cost a lot of money to do the required work.” And frequently, owners balk at the expense.
“I’ll never forget going out to this condo complex on the water, with a contractor, and looking at the corrosion on some of the columns in the garage,” Eugenio Santiago told me. “It wasn’t horrendous. I proposed removing the corroded concrete and wire and pouring new concrete — the price would have been about $3 million. The guy looks at me like I’m crazy. A decade passes. I hear from someone at the same building. I go back. The damage is worse. I say, ‘Now it’s a $20 million job.’ Basically, you pay now or pay later, and many people chose option No. 2.”
-- The article speaks of the Florida legislature trying to beef up reserve requirements in the 2000s. Condo owners and boards, with their lawyers, would appear at hearings and fight the proposals, because of the costs to owners. [Aug comment: Just like board meetings where increases in the assessment are discussed and fought by owners in attendance?]
-- The Mayor of Surfside is real estate developer Charles Burkett. From the article:
[W]hen it came to the collapse, [Mayor Burkett] was unequivocal: It was a true aberration, unlikely to be repeated. “I’ve said this publicly: this doesn’t happen in America,” he told me. “There’s something really wrong here. Really wrong. Listen, I’m a real estate guy, and I’ve been around buildings my whole life. As a matter of fact, I started my career doing historic renovations in South Beach on those Art Deco buildings down there. I did a bunch of them. I understand how buildings are built and how they stand up. And, you know, it was my contention that you wouldn’t have had to lift a finger for four years and that building still shouldn’t have fallen down. There was a trigger, there was something that happened.”
-- The article reports that Mayor Burkett has also given credence to a tweet asserting that the late John McAfee had left secret information in his condo near Champlain Towers South, and someone else set off a bomb to keep those secrets from being discovered.