Lol, I bet these fuckers are panicking to sell their buildings ASAP except they can't.
Well this is a nasty post.
I can't imagine thinking this way. All the costs of ownership, but all the downsides of an apartment
If I'm paying 6 figures for a building, then I'm not being boxed in by somebody else who shares a wall with mine
Shared walls are going to be a thing in any MFH development. Not everyone can afford/maintain a SFH.
Obviously it's really early to know what caused the collapse but isn't her sister building fine? They had maintenance set aside properly.
Yes. According to reports, the sister building has been on top of maintenance and got a clean bill of health.
A lot of the older condos are composed of people who brought when it was cheaper than now, or no longer have the income they once did (retirees)
You make a important point. Condos despite their idea of being for the rich, are basically collectively owned by the residents. Their failure is not good for increasing density.
Like any other home, SFH or not, you have to have upkeep. If you let a building sit, it will deteriorate over time.
Tell that to the people in the OP who are looking at upper five figure to mid six figure special assessments. Nobody's making me pay $500k to fix both my house and every other house on the block once every 20-30 years. Most of those people may not have even known how many reserves there are to draw from.
If you ignored/deferred maintenance on your SFH for 40 years, you'd probably have a big repair bill too.
For condo owners, finances are an open book. Anyone who wants to know the state of reserves just has to ask to see the books. Anyone who doesn't know, doesn't care to know.
It is strange to me (non-American) that the concept of Condos are so weird in North America. It is the main style of building almost everywhere. Here all residential buildings are condos, and I am living in 2 million population city, with tons of old buidings.
The issue in US seems to me as:
1 - Americans don´t understant the cost of maintanance in buidings. I know the most common situation in US is that you rent an apartment and don´t care about maintanance, it should be done by the owner of the building. Fine. But you are still paying for it, the owner includes this cost in the rent, you just don´t see it. When you own or rent an apartment in a condo, you are supposed to pay for the maintanance, which is administrate by a board. Same costs. It seems that americans usually neglet that cost, and building boards don´t pay attention to that. Here we pay a monthly fee for the costs of the building, which includes maintanance and a 10% fee to build up a fund for emergencies/improvements in the building.
2 - Cheaply and badly constructed buildings in some parts of US in the 80s/90s.
Condos aren't unusual in North America. They're common in cities.
Stable like my HOA fee that went from 180$ to 320$ (+ three separate 'special fees' throughout the year because people are too fucking basic to use a washer) last year because the admins folks just woke up about a new law (Quebec City) that forces us to have a sufficient backlog fund to cover 10% of the building's value for repairs?
So fucking glad I sold in June. 😅
You see jumps like that when you have buildings where the owners can't be bothered to care about finances and just want low assessments.
What the US needs is proper renters protection. It's insane to me that a landlord can just up your rent by 50% (or anything really) without any recourse.
In LA our rent went up by 7% every year. my income certainly didn't....
We would need social housing and a move away from local control for zoning for that to happen. So long as NIMBYs can keep density low by blocking MFH going up, you're going to see demand outstrip supply.
That's all it ever really was. When you have so many units and families paying so much each month you have to wonder, how can you not afford such repairs.
If they're budgeting properly, the funds will be there. Often times though owners only want to pay the minimum.
It really is a parallel to the minimum wage debate. Some homeowners want stuff as cheap as possible, rather than paying for quality and to do things properly.
Whether those folks own SFHs or condos, they're still going to look to do everything on the cheap. It's why you can find SFHs for sale in deplorable conditions.
We can compare the two sister buildings in Surfside for an example.
Why don't most places set aside part of the fees they get each month into a emergency account?
They should.
Money generally isn't set aside for one of two reasons:
1) Owners are cheap and don't want to pay for it (kicking the can down the road).
2) Owners are broke and can't pay (you saw this during the last recession where some buildings literally couldn't pay basic bills because homeowners had abandoned the properties and banks hadn't yet foreclosed, because the banks didn't want to be on the hook for the HOA dues).
