Condos: The costs of persistent neglect
The tower collapse in Surfside, Fla., has cast a spotlight on the challenges of condo living, said Mike Baker and Kimiko de FreytasTamura in The New York Times. While an investigation into the tragedy involving the Champlain Towers South complex remains ongoing, the condo’s board for years had “wrestled with how to come up with the $15 million needed to fix the building’s dilapidated roof, a poorly designed pool deck, and crumbling support columns.” The homeowners’ association had only $800,000 in reserves, so 135 condo owners would have had to pay an average of $110,000 each to make up the difference. Although structural failures in the United States are rare, similar “debates over deferred maintenance, money management, and escalating homeowners’ association dues are hardly unfamiliar to condo residents across the country.” Industry leaders have pressed homeowners’ associations to maintain “robust reserve funds.” But according to one expert estimate, “about one-third of associations have 30 percent or less of the money needed to prepare for big-ticket projects.”
Condo board meetings are about to get uglier, said Henry Grabar in Slate.com. The great condo boom came in the 1960s and ’70s, and “that first generation of buildings is getting old at once.” Refurbishments require “complex and expensive decisions” that are “left up to people like you or me”; volunteers on condo boards and homeowners’ associations are responsible for the upkeep of $7 trillion of property nationwide. Social pressure makes it “hard for neighbors to impose big assessments on one another or build up ample reserves.” And residents are often interested only in the short term— “half of condos are resold in less than a decade.” Older buildings were constructed with “little or no thought about the eventual effects of climate change,” said Evan McKenzie in The Washington Post. Surfside was a 12-story condo tower “built 40 years ago on reclaimed beachfront wetlands under constant threat from a rising ocean, saltwater, and gradual land subsidence.” There are 350,000 other condo and homeowners’ associations nationwide facing increased incidences of storms, flooding, wildfires, and the other “unprecedented infrastructure challenges that climate change poses.”
Beachfront living isn’t ending, said Nathan Crooks in Bloomberg .com, but it could get much more expensive. Florida lawmakers “are weighing proposals to ensure that coastal condo associations have sufficient oversight and funding to make timely repairs,” potentially raising HOA fees and special assessments by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Prices for insuring beachfront properties, in Florida and elsewhere, could also rise. These costs can become “a burden that many retirees and others on a fixed budget can’t shoulder.” That will open the door for developers to “simply raze the more-affordable condos” in favor of high-priced new towers.