It's too bad it had to come to this, but we can always hope that the condo board members are among the casualties of this tragedy.
Vertical home owners association’s
Sounds like there is no effective outside owner to sue.
“Anyone who has dealt with condominium boards knows that they are often filled with cheap, useless @ssholes.”
Years ago I bought a new condo in a building similar to the one that recently collapsed. I soon discovered Florida law did not require homeowner’s associations to accumulate reserves. The developer, who controlled the association until the units were sold, elected not to set dues high enough to accumulate reserves for future repairs to the infrastructure. When the developer turned over the building a vote of the homeowners was held and the members also chose not to accumulate reserves. As one 70+ year old told me — I won’t be here when repairs have to be made, so why should I pay?
If journalism wasn’t dead in this country an enterprising investigative reporter should be determining if required maintenance was not undertaken because the homeowner’s association had not accumulated reserves and the board did not want to assess the owners thousands of dollars each for expensive repairs due to deferred maintenance.
It is insanity not accumulate reserves on condo buildings worth tens of millions of dollars which are constantly exposed to extensive water and wind weathering. In my building reproofing was a $120,000 expense, elevator banks were $100,000 each, and painting the building cost over $60,000.
The state should require condo boards to accumulate reserves. However, developers control the state legislature and developers don’t want to be paying in reserves for unsold units during the 3-5 years it takes to sell out a large building Senior citizens buying into new buildings want to minimize dues payments, assuming they will be gone by the time the big maintenance bills, and associated assessments, are incurred.
There is a significant cost of poor legislation and management of properties. In this case, the cost may have been lives in addition to dollars.
Well, one problem with a condo board is there is not a lot of personal liability. If the punt a problem like this and it leads to a disaster, it’s not likely the members of the board are going to lose millions of dollars. If it was an individual building owner or even a corporation owning the property, then they would have a stake in preventing something like this, because they’d be on the hook if they didn’t.
Boy you are some kinda jack hole
Are the politics of being elected to a condominium board any different from what it takes to be elected to Congress? Those who promise cheap fixes will always get more votes than those who embrace unpleasant truths. Gresham’s Law is relentless.