The Towers and the Ticking Clock (Florida condos) [View all]

[Demovictory9]

Last edited Mon Jan 31, 2022, 06:38 AM - Edit history (2)

Long article.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/28/magazine/miami-condo-collapse.html



But meaningful reform, of the kind McGuinness imagined, has long been notoriously hard to enact. Florida has roughly 1.5 million residential condo units — among the most of any state — and a highly lucrative condo and co-op industry with many powerful players, from management companies and developers to firms specializing in condo law. Historically, these groups, and the lobbyists who represent them, have successfully pushed back against any policy they view as constrictive or unduly expensive. And already, just months after the collapse of Champlain Towers South, there are signs that similar efforts are underway. “You’d hope that this is the wake-up call,” Steven Geller, a longtime state senator and representative, told me of Champlain Towers. “But I’d anticipate the same thing we’ve seen since the 1980s. The same thing, incidentally, that you see with mass shootings, or at least mass shootings back when they were rare. The lobbying groups go out and go: ‘Listen, now is really not the time to deal with this. Now is the time to pray and heal. Let’s talk about it next year.’ Then next year comes around, and guess what? It’s old news. Let me tell you: I want to be wrong, but my experience says, ‘Be realistic.’”

Pull up a map of the Florida coast, drop your finger onto the surface and you’ll almost certainly land on a town or city with its own disaster in the making. According to one recent study, 918,000 of Florida’s condo units are, like the ones in Champlain Towers South, more than 30 years old; 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.”