12 story apartment building suddenly collapses in Miami

[manly]

Nearly universally people in the US bitch about their association fees and want them as low as possible, while having infinite services. So what happens? The obvious stuff get taken care of and all expensive maintenance is deferred, but that is exactly what the property owners vote for and in this case it cost them their property.

I've never paid HOA fees, but this sounds to me like hyperbole. It's not people clamoring for infinite services, but seeing how their monthly HOA gives them no value (common areas landscaped? Access to pool?). Special assessments suck as they tend to be higher cost, but at least you know exactly what they are paying for. It's not unlike people who complain about taxes when they drive over the same crumbling roads and highways all the time. I'm not saying who's right or wrong, but our nature is to believe we should get something for what we pay.

I agree. From what I’ve read it seems like they were notified they had serious issues and didn’t take action.

Morabito Consultants is an old, respected firm. Their 2018 report was pretty clear that additional water inundation would be a severe problem. I don't believe they ever said anything about risk of total collapse.

They did a follow-up report earlier this year prior to the $15M in work being approved by the owners, and there is now some grumbling over that report. The report specifically said they tested some of the concrete and the results were "curious." WTF does that mean? Nobody knows, at least not from reading the report.

Secondly, with the nature of the damage they saw (it had gotten worse since 2018), they did not inform city officials. They aren't legally obligated to, and it's likely they didn't foresee total failure. I'd imagine for reputational reasons alone, they would have banged all drums and harassed all sorts of people if that was even a remote probability. They were somewhat constrained in this assessment because they were told the pool area would remain open to residents the whole time.

Morabito has been or will be sued for not being vociferous enough in their warnings. I don't know what their exposure is, legally.

Was this an issue that if detected and addressed before it became a threat, maybe 10 - 20 years ago, would have been a lot less expensive to drop on the residents?
Or even insurance if the issues are the result of long ago hurricane damage.

I'm no expert, but it seems like they probably had a chance to fix things at major cost 3 years ago. No doubt the cost a decade or two ago would have been less than a building dropping. Sorry, bad pun. I suspect that by the time they finally started the roof repair, it was too late to save the building but they could have saved lives.

 

[K1052]

I've never paid HOA fees, but this sounds to me like hyperbole. It's not people clamoring for infinite services, but seeing how their monthly HOA gives them no value (common areas landscaped? Access to pool?). Special assessments suck as they tend to be higher cost, but at least you know exactly what they are paying for. It's not unlike people who complain about taxes when they drive over the same crumbling roads and highways all the time. I'm not saying who's right or wrong, but our nature is to believe we should get something for what we pay.

Ahem a sampling:

When I sold my last place the buyer tried to get an indemnification against any special assessment levied in the following 3 years after the sale. In the same building one of the PH owners embroiled the management company and condo board in 5 different lawsuits just because. Another owner drove though a $10K ornamental iron parking gate because they were annoyed their clicker didn't work, then sued the building over it. There was a special due to the roof membrane reaching past the end of life and a sizable minority wanted to just go on pretending it wouldn't eventually fail instead of spending to replace it..of course the special was larger because PH assholes pointlessly draining reserve funds due to legal fees.

Condo owners are fucking crazy and I've been one four times.

 

[pmv]

Another article about it

The Dream of Florida Is Dead

The Miami condo collapse is a crisis for the entire state.

slate.com

Funny that they say Home Owners Associations are a kind of 'socialism'. It's interesting to me insofar as the issues seem similar to the problems that beset large council-built high-rises and estates ('social housing') here. They got a lot of flak, in the form of hostility to the 'brutalist' architecture they were built with, or sneers about the nature and presumed behaviour of the low-income residents, but the real problem with them has always been that they need a lot of maintenance or, either very bad things happen (like in this case) or they just slowly crumble and become grotty places to live.
And when they were built the state didn't really take into account what they were taking on in terms of long-term maintenance expenditure, so they were left to decay. The political problems of actually funding the required maintenance proved too great.

Yet in this case it seems like a very similar problem but it's with private accomodation, in a 'free market', not 'social housing'. It's not actually 'socialism', but it seems to have the same problems.

 

[fskimospy]

Ahem a sampling:

When I sold my last place the buyer tried to get an indemnification against any special assessment levied in the following 3 years after the sale. In the same building one of the PH owners embroiled the management company and condo board in 5 different lawsuits just because. Another owner drove though a $10K ornamental iron parking gate because they were annoyed their clicker didn't work, then sued the building over it. There was a special due to the roof membrane reaching past the end of life and a sizable minority wanted to just go on pretending it wouldn't eventually fail instead of spending to replace it..of course the special was larger because PH assholes pointlessly draining reserve funds due to legal fees.

Condo owners are fucking crazy and I've been one four times.

My favorite was a woman in my building posted flyers everywhere saying the board was orchestrating a campaign where people would come pee on her door so she was suing the building. She mentioned she was a lawyer and underlined how SHE HAD NEVER LOST A CASE.

Amusingly enough she signed it at the bottom indicating she was still in law school. So, in a sense she was right but that’s like me saying I’ve never lost a patient in surgery.

 

[Meghan54]

My favorite was a woman in my building posted flyers everywhere saying the board was orchestrating a campaign where people would come pee on her door so she was suing the building. She mentioned she was a lawyer and underlined how SHE HAD NEVER LOST A CASE.

Amusingly enough she signed it at the bottom indicating she was still in law school. So, in a sense she was right but that’s like me saying I’ve never lost a patient in surgery.

I've seen a medical surg. resident put his finger through a girl's heart tissue, so anything's possible. Fucked her up a bit, too.

 

[pmv]

My favorite was a woman in my building posted flyers everywhere saying the board was orchestrating a campaign where people would come pee on her door so she was suing the building. She mentioned she was a lawyer and underlined how SHE HAD NEVER LOST A CASE.

Amusingly enough she signed it at the bottom indicating she was still in law school. So, in a sense she was right but that’s like me saying I’ve never lost a patient in surgery.

Was she one of Trump's post-election team?

 

[PingSpike]

Ahem a sampling:

When I sold my last place the buyer tried to get an indemnification against any special assessment levied in the following 3 years after the sale. In the same building one of the PH owners embroiled the management company and condo board in 5 different lawsuits just because. Another owner drove though a $10K ornamental iron parking gate because they were annoyed their clicker didn't work, then sued the building over it. There was a special due to the roof membrane reaching past the end of life and a sizable minority wanted to just go on pretending it wouldn't eventually fail instead of spending to replace it..of course the special was larger because PH assholes pointlessly draining reserve funds due to legal fees.

Condo owners are fucking crazy and I've been one four times.

I honestly don't know why people buy condos, unless they're renting them out as an investment or something. They seem to combine all of the worst parts of home ownership with the worst parts of apartment living to me. But it seems like all they build anymore are condos and gigantic mini mansions. I've heard the cost to build simple houses isn't much different than the mansions but of course they make way less money on them so that's kind of why developments go that way.

 

[K1052]

I honestly don't know why people buy condos, unless they're renting them out as an investment or something. They seem to combine all of the worst parts of home ownership with the worst parts of apartment living to me. But it seems like all they build anymore are condos and gigantic mini mansions. I've heard the cost to build simple houses isn't much different than the mansions but of course they make way less money on them so that's kind of why developments go that way.

They're kind of a necessity in urban areas if you want to own but can't afford anything else. A SFH back where I'd want to live in Chicago would run 1-2M. A decent condo might be 200-300K. When we eventually leave Austin I'll once again have to put condos on the consideration list since we'd likely be moving to the west coast.

 

[fskimospy]

I've seen a medical surg. resident put his finger through a girl's heart tissue, so anything's possible. Fucked her up a bit, too.

I meant more that she’s never lost a case because she’s never tried a case.

 

[Zorba]

FL and other coastal areas had Hurricanes long before the 80s when this one was built .... on a sandbar. There are other similar buildings on the same sandbar, one of which is a sister to this one. Not sure how many of them were built earlier.

Designers need to plan for the worst when building in places commonly subject to the worst.

Miami is 12th on this list of most commonly affected regions:

Ranking of Cities Hit Most By Hurricanes & Tropical Storms - HurricaneCity

Ranks 139 locations in the Atlantic basin that get affected most by hurricanes and tropical storms. (includes Caribbean)

www.hurricanecity.com

We don't hear of buildings falling down in other cities on that list.

This had nothing to do with a hurricane.

 

[Zorba]

Was this an issue that if detected and addressed before it became a threat, maybe 10 - 20 years ago, would have been a lot less expensive to drop on the residents?
Or even insurance if the issues are the result of long ago hurricane damage.

Yes. If the concrete had been patched and sealed the rebar wouldn't have rusted, which caused more concrete sprawling and more rusting. Just like anything else, much cheaper to do small repairs and preventive maintenance than wait until you have major issues.

 

[Zorba]

I've never paid HOA fees, but this sounds to me like hyperbole. It's not people clamoring for infinite services, but seeing how their monthly HOA gives them no value (common areas landscaped? Access to pool?). Special assessments suck as they tend to be higher cost, but at least you know exactly what they are paying for. It's not unlike people who complain about taxes when they drive over the same crumbling roads and highways all the time. I'm not saying who's right or wrong, but our nature is to believe we should get something for what we pay.

HOAs are open organizations accountable to their members. I've never seen one that paid it's board members. All the money goes to services and upkeep. People just don't like that the upkeep is expensive.

I've seen it many times, people come to an HOA meeting bitching about how much they pay and they don't get X, after coming to the meetings for a month or two they usually want to raise dues because they understand commercial poolcare is expensive, landscaping is insanely expensive, etc.

My neighborhood had an ice storm this year, cost 100k to clean up, our whole budget is 136k. Luckily we have reserves, but people still complain we haven't fixed the greenbelt fence yet. We also have to spend 2-5k a year onpool furniture because people year it up.

 

[Zorba]

Ahem a sampling:

When I sold my last place the buyer tried to get an indemnification against any special assessment levied in the following 3 years after the sale. In the same building one of the PH owners embroiled the management company and condo board in 5 different lawsuits just because. Another owner drove though a $10K ornamental iron parking gate because they were annoyed their clicker didn't work, then sued the building over it. There was a special due to the roof membrane reaching past the end of life and a sizable minority wanted to just go on pretending it wouldn't eventually fail instead of spending to replace it..of course the special was larger because PH assholes pointlessly draining reserve funds due to legal fees.

Condo owners are fucking crazy and I've been one four times.

Exactly this. People don't want to fund reserves, they don't want to fund PM, and they don't want to pay to fix things that don't directly effect then today. Then because reserves were never funded, everything has to be done via assessment.

 

[Jaskalas]

How long is a structure supposed to stand without any maintenance? Clearly it had some integrity because it survived for 40 years and through several hurricanes. Are the designers and builders on the hook for eternity?

My understanding is that the owners supposedly let the support columns sit in water and weather rot for decades.

 

[MichaelMay]

My understanding is that the owners supposedly let the support columns sit in water and weather rot for decades.

I'd say the deal is quite simple, condemn the building or renovate and if you don't do either make it cost them 100 times what it would cost to do either.

If they can't pay they can make number plates and combat helmets instead, for as long as it takes for them to make enough cents to pay for all of it.

 

[MtnMan]

I've never paid HOA fees, but this sounds to me like hyperbole. It's not people clamoring for infinite services, but seeing how their monthly HOA gives them no value (common areas landscaped? Access to pool?). Special assessments suck as they tend to be higher cost, but at least you know exactly what they are paying for. It's not unlike people who complain about taxes when they drive over the same crumbling roads and highways all the time. I'm not saying who's right or wrong, but our nature is to believe we should get something for what we pay.

Nor will I ever live under the thumb of an HOA. Common landscaped areas? I've got property. Access to pool, if I want access, I'll join a local pool. My wife actually had a membership at one till COVID. She couldn't use it, so she cancelled paying.
Friend lives in a complex of duplexes, so kinda condo like. At one time he did ride a motorcycle, and a little sanity and coaxing by his wife caused him to give that up. Good thing, as if he had one now he would have to shut it off at the entrance to the grounds and push it to his garage, probably a 1/4 mile and uphill. They have 'access to the pool' but here the climate dictates that is typically Memorial Day to Labor Day.

I'm no expert, but it seems like they probably had a chance to fix things at major cost 3 years ago. No doubt the cost a decade or two ago would have been less than a building dropping. Sorry, bad pun. I suspect that by the time they finally started the roof repair, it was too late to save the building but they could have saved lives.

Was it a leaky roof that caused the problem, or groundwater from pool decks, driveways, etc.? Seems the roof repairs would either be to address interior water damage, or proactive repairs to prevent the same.

 

[MichaelMay]

Nor will I ever live under the thumb of an HOA. Common landscaped areas? I've got property. Access to pool, if I want access, I'll join a local pool. My wife actually had a membership at one till COVID. She couldn't use it, so she cancelled paying.
Friend lives in a complex of duplexes, so kinda condo like. At one time he did ride a motorcycle, and a little sanity and coaxing by his wife caused him to give that up. Good thing, as if he had one now he would have to shut it off at the entrance to the grounds and push it to his garage, probably a 1/4 mile and uphill. They have 'access to the pool' but here the climate dictates that is typically Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Was it a leaky roof that caused the problem, or groundwater from pool decks, driveways, etc.? Seems the roof repairs would either be to address interior water damage, or proactive repairs to prevent the same.

Da fuq is a HOA, is this some sort of American bullshit that I'm far too European to understand like your gun fetish?

 

[Leeea]

Da fuq is a HOA, is this some sort of American bullshit that I'm far too European to understand like your gun fetish?

pure tyranny

 

[MtnMan]

Da fuq is a HOA, is this some sort of American bullshit that I'm far too European to understand like your gun fetish?

Stands for Home Owners Association. It is a nanny level of government control, but it is not a government in that it doesn't have the constraints an actual government has to exist under.
They can dictate how long your grass is allowed to get before they fine you.
They can dictate what color you are allowed to paint your house, or even your front door.
They can dictate how many minutes per day you are allowed to have your garage door open, or mandate that you leave it open during the day to "prove" no one is living in your garage.
They can mandate that the drapes/blinds facing the street be closed 24/7, so neighbors don't have to look at your ugly stuff.
They can mandate that the drapes/blinds be either white or beige.
The list goes on and on, anything a nosey old busybody asshole can dream up and get included into the "HOA Covenants".

And yes, they have far too much authority. They can fine you, and if you don't pay put a lien on your property, and foreclose on your property.

Local governments in some places are mandating that new developments must have an HOA. That takes the burden of dealing with people off of the city.

The greatest lie today is that America is a free country.

 

[MichaelMay]

pure tyranny

I read up on it, it seems like a country club but you get to kinda borrow some land from it as long as you follow every single part of their rules?

That is NOT being a home owner. I bought and paid for my home and if someone wants to tell me that I can't plant something or can't have an old, stripped MG on my lawn that I'm renovating they can seriously go fuck themselves.

If the value of your home means more to you than it being your ACTUAL home that you decide over it makes sense but that isn't a home, it's just a rented lot with a house on it that isn't really yours.

 

[MichaelMay]

Stands for Home Owners Association. It is a nanny level of government control, but it is not a government in that it doesn't have the constraints an actual government has to exist under.
They can dictate how long your grass is allowed to get before they fine you.
They can dictate what color you are allowed to paint your house, or even your front door.
They can dictate how many minutes per day you are allowed to have your garage door open, or mandate that you leave it open during the day to "prove" no one is living in your garage.
They can mandate that the drapes/blinds facing the street be closed 24/7, so neighbors don't have to look at your ugly stuff.
They can mandate that the drapes/blinds be either white or beige.

And yes, they have far too much authority. They can fine you, and if you don't pay put a lien on your property, and foreclose on your property.

Local governments in some places are mandating that new developments must have an HOA. That takes the burden of dealing with people off of the city.

The greatest lie today is that America is a free country.

Yeah I read up on it, who in the fucking hell would agree to have neighbors decide over what you may plant or what how you want to grow things in YOUR OWN BOUGHT PROPERTY?

That is just fucking insane. You're not the owner at that point, it's not YOUR property, it's the property of the HOA. And what is extra fucking American about this is that people pay to have the rights to own their own property taken away from them?

I mean, if you are buying and selling and not living in it that makes sense... Oh ... that's why...

 

[MtnMan]

I read up on it, it seems like a country club but you get to kinda borrow some land from it as long as you follow every single part of their rules?

That is NOT being a home owner. I bought and paid for my home and if someone wants to tell me that I can't plant something or can't have an old, stripped MG on my lawn that I'm renovating they can seriously go fuck themselves.

If the value of your home means more to you than it being your ACTUAL home that you decide over it makes sense but that isn't a home, it's just a rented lot with a house on it that isn't really yours.

Some may be kinda 'country club' like. Pool, tennis courts, etc. Some are just fucking neighborhoods, with no "public area", no pool, or any other amenities. Just a bunch of houses on a street, but under the control of nosey assholes that can't stand not being in other peoples business. And they charge you a monthly HOA fee for the privilege.

 

[MichaelMay]

Some may be kinda 'country club' like. Pool, tennis courts, etc. Some are just fucking neighborhoods, with no "public area", no pool, or any other amenities. Just a bunch of houses on a street, but under the control of nosey assholes that can't stand not being in other peoples business. And they charge you a monthly HOA fee for the privilege.

Fuck them, there are pools everywhere around here, kept by the government and public. Tennis courts as well but people rarely use them these days.

It's not part of any HOA though, if you have a poor kid from some apartment he's just as welcome as anyone else.

I mean, who the hell can live like that?

Edit: To clarify, who the hell can live in a home they BOUGHT with their own hard earned money and yet get no say over it's outside appearance? My MG will be fixed when I get around to it, if someone doesn't like it they can fuck off.

 

[Saylick]

WaPo has a good article summarizing what evidence we have about the cause of collapse. Didn't see it linked in the thread (I think) so here it is:
Video, images and interviews deepen questions about role of pool deck in condo collapse

 

[fskimospy]

Da fuq is a HOA, is this some sort of American bullshit that I'm far too European to understand like your gun fetish?

I mean you could Google it and take ten seconds to understand it.