Far from Fla., mayors fear prospect of collapse in cities
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When it rains outside in Kansas City, Mo., it also rains inside the rickety underground garage at City Hall, where parking spaces for the mayor and city manager sit below rebar and crumbled concrete that musty stormwater can easily seep through.
The garage’s decay had long been obvious to Kansas City leaders. After all, they park there. But fixing it had not been an urgent priority until nearly 100 people died last month in the collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Fla. Since then, the pedestrian plaza above the publicly owned City Hall garage has been fenced off, dozens of municipal workers have been told they must soon park elsewhere and officials have discussed how to identify and fix other decrepit structures in the city.
Across the country, local officials have looked nervously to their own skylines and wondered whether a crisis might be looming. Since the tragedy in Florida, plans to step up inspections, enforce existing rules or crack down on problem properties have emerged in Los Angeles County, Washington, D.C., and Jersey City, N.J.
“There is a true structural and, I think, life threat in not addressing the core infrastructure issue,” said Mayor Quinton Lucas, of Kansas City. “I just don’t think we are thinking about dangerous buildings in a broad enough way.”
Many places have rigorous inspections and permitting requirements for new structures, but there is often limited follow-up in the decades after construction is completed. Supervision of existing structures is delegated to a patchwork of local and state governments and condo boards. And even when rules are in place — like in Kansas City, where owners of private parking garages are supposed to file periodic inspection reports with the city — compliance and enforcement are often lacking.
“I just think it’s been a blind spot for states and cities for a long, long time,” said Mayor Steven Fulop, of Jersey City, who has proposed an ordinance that would require facade inspections every five years and structural inspections every 10 years for high-rises. “We’re building a lot of buildings without ongoing safety checks after a reasonable amount of time.”
Mr. Fulop said that in the days after the Florida collapse, as news emerged that structural problems at the Surfside tower had festered for years, his office began receiving emails from Jersey City residents worried about deferred maintenance in their own buildings.
Mr. Fulop said his office became aware of one condo association that had accumulated almost $50 million in deferred maintenance, meaning each homeowner could be charged hundreds of thousands of dollars. The steep price tag and lack of enforcement, he said, had allowed the situation to worsen.
But requiring more inspections can also raise costs for property owners. And without follow-up, even the most thorough inspection will not prevent a collapse. Although the cause of the Surfside collapse remains under investigation, a consultant had urged the property owners three years earlier to repair “major structural damage.”
The proposals that have emerged across the country since the Surfside collapse vary widely in scope and specificity.
In the Los Angeles area, county supervisors called for inspections of high-rise buildings in Marina del Rey, where some residents are worried about the safety of their buildings. In Washington, where a condo building under construction recently collapsed, Mayor Muriel Bowser has imposed citywide permitting and inspection requirements, which she described as an “early warning system.”