A House Built on Sand (cont.)
by John Lawrence
There's a reason why the condos in Miami Beach and other Florida seaside communities are built with concrete and rebar construction - it's cheaper than steel beam construction. These condos have two things against them - the type of construction and the fact that they are not built on bedrock. In addition deregulation is part and parcel of the Republican cri de coeur. Lax building codes are the result of poor regulation. Consider the "skyscrapers" in Manhattan built on bedrock with steel beam construction, some of which are 150 years old and none of which have ever fallen down except for 9/11. There's a reason why you find the tallest skyscrapers in midtown Manhattan and then again in lower Manhattan with an intervening area composed of lower buildings. That's because the bedrock is far deeper in this intervening area. The bedrock closest to the surface is in midtown Manhattan and then again in lower Manhattan. One might conclude that Manhattan building codes are far stricter than those found in Florida beach communities.
Local officials in Florida work hand in hand with developers as they do in a lot of places that want economic development. Developers usually get what they want and in Florida they get lax building codes. The financial structure of condominiums also lets the developer build a building, sell it off to individual investors and then the developer bears no future responsibility or liability for the project unlike a hotel or apartment building which is owned by one person or entity. The individual condo owners are responsible for all future maintenance and repairs on the property. Already some neighboring condo associations have had to do special assessments to do costly repairs which adds considerably to monthly Home Owner Association (HOA) dues. The condo owners at Champlain Towers South were facing just such a costly special assessment when the building collapsed. They had been put on notice of these repairs in 2018 by a building inspection report, but put off the repairs and special assessment until it was too late.
Building maintenance for older concrete and rebar construction can result in considerable cost to condo owners that they hadn't counted on. Building subsidence, the gradual sinking of buildings not built on bedrock, can cause cracks in the concrete through which water can seep in corroding the rebar and rendering it useless. Climate change is bringing about sunny day flooding in Florida and other places in which salt water seeps into the ground water under a building undermining concrete slabs and altering structural integrity. Cracks in pools can also result in water seepage underground which destroys a building's integrity from below. Hurricanes, thunder storms and increased flooding due to climate change all can have an impact on a building's integrity. This all redounds to the pocket books of condo owners and not the developers who got in and got out quickly with huge profits.
Building codes will have to be updated. Architects and civil engineers will have to design buildings with more structural integrity and condo owners will have to realize that they are subject to special assessments to pay for expensive repairs and other things like lawsuits against the condo association. Insurance rates on older and poorly maintained buildings are bound to go up.
Recent Comments