It seems I can’t view that link on a phone unless I download the app. I didn’t realize Imgur has started blocking content from web browser users. For others here, requesting a desktop version of the website lets you view the user’s gallery that the parent linked to.
The geology of Florida is terrifying. I’ve been reading about how a building like this could collapse, and I came across this interesting phrase, “sink hole alley” The area between Tampa and Orlando. The bed rock is so unstable that sinkholes have become ubiquitous.
Confirmed, as someone living in “sink hole alley”. Also look up the sink hole of Epcot and what Disney engineers did to solve that. No one thinks of it when they visit Epcot but it’s there, under their nose, the whole time. [1]
It’s almost the opposite in NYC. Huge buildings on solid foundations. Hard part is building. Everything you drop you need to build same day. Good luck organizing it!
The new midtown superthins are held up by reinforced concrete and are swaying in the breeze. They're going to be a liability once enough cracks develop.
I remember being on the top of the Eiffel Tower, and you could feel the slow swaying. It was like being on a ship. You couldn't see the swaying, you just felt constantly off balance.
even better is the strawbrrry growers are still allowed to pump down the aquifer if it freezes encouraging salt watdr intrusion and dissolution. florida is really a bad place for republican deregulation.
I remember a car sinking (sink hole) at a gas station near my home in Florida... but in this case, sink holes were not the problem... and the owner knew about structural and draining problems (they just did nothing about it)
Court records showed the Crestview Towers Condo Association had sued its insurance company for unspecified damages from Hurricane Irma in 2017. The damages had exceeded $30,000, but the association never got a payment to cover the damages, the lawsuit said.
The parties were ordered into mediation last May, according to a Miami-Dade court docket.
A parallel federal lawsuit between Crestview Towers and the insurer says damage from Hurricane Irma was $8.1 million.
Yes, let's evacuate a building that requires $8M of repairs.
Well they don't want to fix it, and presumably the lack of repairs is dangerous. What is the government supposed to do? Do the repairs for them and send them a bill?
No, I meant what I said. The time for argument is over. Get those people out of that dangerous situation. Later we can investigate who should have paid what when.
The who should pay part might be even more important now. As a condo the individual owners are collectively on the hook for repairs if insurance doesn't pay out. And they're now in possession of condo units they can't sell and also can't live in. Their individual homeowners insurance will presumably, hopefully cover them now.
If there are other insurers involved, they should already be running the lawsuit against the scam insurance company. If it only took a week to find another building like this, Florida over the next five years is going to be very good for attorneys and very bad for insurers.
The damage to the building is presumably in the condo's common elements, so no I do not believe it would be covered by a individual homeowners policy. Their individual unit has no damage, it's the structure below the unit that needs repair.
The homeowners are out of luck until a claim is made on the master insurance policy.
This shouldn't actually be a problem because that's what the master policy is for but it sounds like something has gone wrong with making a claim.
And a smaller example is large cities and things like bedbugs or other infestations. If the owner doesn't act, the city will call an exterminator and put a lien on the building.
Wait, the building manager was sitting on a re-certification report (that was required by the county/city) since Jan that said the building was unsafe? Wtf?
You’ve not dealt with South Florida HOAs. Literally the worst I’ve ever encountered. One that I dealt with tried to pass of hazard insurance as flood insurance. When confronted, rather than own up, they suggested they could “talk my lender into accepting it anyway. I almost sued them for fraud until realizing no point spending good money to chase nothing.
It’s like a different world with these HOAs. Lots of corruption and red tape and hiding behind procedures. I hope these situations call to light the severe issues in this area with HOA / property management companies. Gross negligence seems to be a lot more common than you’d ever guess. This is based on first hand conversations to supplement my own experience.
Nationally, it may be worst of all from Tampa/Orlando, south to Miami. However, it's a problem all over the US, even in midrange cities like Bozeman and Chattanooga.
>I used to live in WPB about 4 years ago. It wasn't that bad to find a rental at the time
The rental shortage just started this year. As bad as it is, I see it getting much worse as eviction moratoriums expire.
Sounds like work-from-home readjustment... I wonder how the "overpriced cities" will readjust. Will everyone just move back, or will new employees take over?
You're right. For some unfathomable reason, Central to South Florida looked especially appealing for work-from-homers. Even homes for sale are getting immediate offers way above listing.
> Must be a good time to be a real estate agent.
Yes and no. They're facing the same shortages as everyone else.
The Washington Post article in this talks about them contacting homeless shelters.
> The city is working with Red Cross and a local homelessness organization to house those unable to find other shelter.
> She said the 156-unit complex was occupied primarily by Latino residents, some of whom were very elderly. “They’re crying, they’re afraid for their future, afraid about what to do with the furniture,” she said.
Rental owners are cashing in and selling. Even people with a bit of cash in the bank will have to compete with hundreds of other applicants.
My guess is that officials will find shelters full up, as this has been in play for a number of months now. At least the rental crisis will finally show up on someone's radar - not that they'll have any power to help.
The Republican Mayor of Miami was recently making deals with a lot of cryptocurrencies like Algorand. His father was removed as mayor in the 90s due to massive voter fraud, and also supported cult leader Yahweh ben Yahweh who was convicted of conspiracy in more than a dozen murders
I live in Minneapolis. Back in 2007 the I-35W bridge collapsed, killing 13 people. Engineers had previously reported that the bridge had structural problems. And once the collapse became national headlines news, bridges nationwide were given special attention.
It shouldn't take horrific accidents for us to suddenly decide to care about structural safety.
I think the idea is that the market is supposed to work by the principals having good information about their situation and thus being to choose the best decisions. That's at least my one line summary.
In this case it's hard to say someone else was to blame, because the principals had mostly not delegated the decision, they were literally deciding with their own lives at stake. If it were some principal agent problem you'd find a common excuse: it's the agents fault, they chose in their own interest and not the principals.
And yet somehow they didn't decide to repair the building. So yes, even though we had a bunch of free adults with years to make the decision and the lowest interest rates ever, they didn't fix a thing that represents a catastrophic risk to themselves.
No doubt someone will dig deeper into this and find some way the market was impeded, ideological wars being what they are, but it's hard to see how that would explain away the casual observation that people had the agency to avoid getting killed here.
Note that I'm not arguing for more government control over these things, that tends to create an agency problem. Just puzzled over how it could get to this, and a bit questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.
> questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.
I suggest putting this into context of all the buildings in the US. This is an exceedingly rare event. Perhaps the very fact that buildings are so safe in the US lulled the residents into a false sense of security.
For example, when an earthquake hits a third world city, half the city falls down. When an earthquake hits a US city, the damage is light.
I remember the Nisqually quake here 20 years ago. The ground was rocking and rolling making it risky to walk, poles were swinging, and buildings were swaying. But there was very little damage.
Back in the 80's I was in Tokyo and woke up to an earthquake. I mentioned it at work the next day, and the reaction of the workers there was "so what".
Maybe no system results in the best possible outcome every time? Government owned bridges have collapsed because warnings were ignored. Privately owned apartments collapsed because warnings were ignored.
The common factor here is that the warnings were ignored by humans. Creatures that reached the peak of their evolution on the plains of Africa.
Whilst masters of the earth, our cognition just isn’t tuned to dealing with low-probability high-consequence events that may occur on a time scale outside our life spans.
I think a free market tends to work better with predictable events, transparency, and large market sizes. None of those applied in this case.
In this case the negative event was a black swan event. The board and residents were required to correctly understand the risk of failure to remediate problems in this specific building. Who does an in-depth analysis of risk of building failure when renting or buying a property? Not a single person correctly identified that a collapse was imminent.
The other problem with rare events is that you can ignore them most of the time and not suffer any consequences. If there is a one in a thousand chance of something bad happening, and addressing that risk will cost you your job, or money, or your reputation then 99.9% of the time you incur that cost unnecessarily. That means that an entity that addresses risk becomes less competitive than a (lucky) company who doesn't.
If you increase the market size, then a lot of these complaints go away. Assessing risk of collapse across a hundred thousand buildings, like an insurance company might do, is much easier. If buildings were maintained by corporations that controlled many properties, people could avoid companies with poor track records.
It's a predictable failure for human organizations in general, I'd say. There are plenty of instances where the government fucks up similarly, no profit motive required.
The problem is the same as it is in IT. Risk management and disaster prevention requires money, which people rarely want to spend. Boards for condos are elected, and they try to keep costs low. No one is going to elect someone who says the building should spend millions to prevent a collapse that they feel is theoretical.
This is exactly what happened with Champlain Towers. After that assessment, they got a repair estimate and then the board and residents argued with each other about the price of fixing it for 3 years... all the way up to the moment it collapsed.
A typical condo ownership involves fractional ownership of the building with occupancy rights to a specific unit. The costs for general repair come out of a common pool of dues paid by each owner.
As another person mentioned, because the condo owners are all collectively responsible for the maintenance. I currently serve as the president of an HOA.
We've needed new roofs for years. We got bids, but by the time that the HOA could meet, the bids already were too old. We voted to charge everyone based off the cost of the bids + 10%. We had owners that didn't pay or owners that paid too late. Our bids expired again and then we had some safety issues that we had to handle. So now we didn't have enough money for the roofs again, but likewise people wanted other stuff done.
It took nearly 5 years for us to finally get new roofs. Covid happened and prices went up again, but thankfully we had enough to cover stuff. Actually, only some of the roofs are currently done. 6 buildings: 3 done/3 not. <50 units total. I cannot imagine how much more complicated it would be with a bunch of units.
Even worse, they’re just elected from the pool of residents, right? They’re likely to not know anything about actually managing a building, are doing it as a side job, and they have limited ability to enforce things.
And in healthcare. Doctors always shoo me away when I show warning signs. They're not interested in getting to the bottom of warning signs. They'd rather wait until shit happens before they're interested in taking my money and solving it.
Oh and in a system where health insurance really cared about prevention, they'd pay for everyone's gym memberships.
If it’s free why not sign up, maybe someday I’ll use it. Maybe not
Edit: decrease the amount done as a percentage of signups. Perhaps the growth in signups would make up for the percentage drop in aggregate terms. Ie flood the gym with memberships and only find one more person actually working out
Hah, nowadays there are mask mandates (more in Europe rather than in the Land of the Free). Makes me wonder what the world would be like with gym attendance mandates, or 10000 steps-a-day mandates.
I think the costs of taking it seriously before the disaster and after the disaster would be similar. The difference is that before the disaster, the budget seems discretionary and afterwords feels mandatory. Also, after the disaster, many people are dead.
I'd say we could trade away the feeling that we could spend the money elsewhere for the lives of all the people who were killed.
You making it sound like having higher tax rates — and a marginally worse quality of life — to prevent people from dying is an unambiguously bad choice?
I am ok with it as long as the people with more money than me cannot simply create/find loopholes that allows them not to pay. The main argument against higher taxes to me is it becomes very easy for "them" to allocate a small portion of their vast wealths into creating more loopholes.
I can't believe we don't have any successful politicians who campaign on the promise of higher taxes and an end to all credits, deductions, and exclusions for everyone. It feels like it isn't sellable at all.
And by “fair share” you mean even proportionally more of their income than yours. Because aside from some people living purely off of cap gains, the doctors/lawyers/engineers/small business owners already pay more absolute values and more percentage values than the lower and middle class.
I would be happy to pay more taxes. I’d pay more on taxes than I currently do in insurance premiums to get everyone healthcare (though it seems likely I’d end up paying less).
This is a bit of a strawman. People do care about structural safety. There is an entire industry of professional engineers and building inspectors.
You don't know what you don't know. And disasters happen. After Hurricane Andrew, we learned from studying what broke, and made major improvements to building codes. Same thing will happen here.
That building was reported under the same safety industry and regulations, and nothing was done. We know intellectually, just as before, what happens to buildings with structural failures: they collapse. The difference is that we quickly forget the emotional or cultural awareness of the problem, and only care about these issues for as long as that news cycle lasts.
But sometimes inspections work - the I40 bridge crack/shutdown in Memphis, for example (though apparently there are questions about why the problem was not discovered earlier).
I imagine that due to simple laws of increasing entropy, any structure will eventually collapse, it's just a question of when, not if.
What do people normally do to check if a building is facing a possibility of collapse in the near future? I don't think I've seen anyone poking around at most buildings I've occupied before to check for structural integrity.
While over any time frame a building will eventually collapse it's worth recalling that in europe many of the buildings are substantially older than those in the US.
I foresee collapsing buildings becoming more and more of an issue for fast erected buildings from the past 50 or so years
Slightly an aside but I believe that is part of the reason why leases in Singapore are often 99 years - because the government doesn't plan for them to last beyond then
> it's worth recalling that in europe many of the buildings are substantially older than those in the US.
Not anything this tall. Mid to high rises weren’t really possible until very recently historically speaking.
Also don’t forget that you’re literally hitting survivor bias here. Of course the old buildings still standing in Europe are the good construction, all of the others are gone.
You're quite right on both size of buildings and also survivorship bias!
Although the prevalence of old housing across the UK suggests (to me at least) that something systematic has changed. The fact that people can have an obsession with tudor, georgian, Victorian style housing tells me that things were built to last in a way that might be less true today.
As you say, the technology to build so high is a recent one, I note the Empire State Building is only 80 years old which is pretty young when compared against Notre Dame for example
The best practice is to perform industry-standard inspections every few years such that the possibility of an actual collapse is logarithmically less likely than a prolonged FAANG outage, but it would appear that state guidelines in Florida do not mandate this level of due diligence.
What would good regulation of condos and homeowners associations look like? Are there any locales that have models that are particularly worth emulating? What do they mandate?
As I said in another thread. I have seen many condo buildings in at least superficially worse shape than the one that collapsed in Miami. Especially in vacation / resort towns.
This is tragic, but hopefully a wake up call. Condos aren’t managed the way other large buildings are. Structural engineers are catching the problems on inspection it seems, but perhaps have too little power to actually make the call on mandating maintenance and/or evacuation.
Deferred maintenance by PG&E, well, the complete lack of maitenance caused the camp fire, the most deadly and destructive fire in California history, in 2018. And freight rail lines are handled much the same way—a major derailment at the wrong place causing catastrophic loss of life is just waiting to happen.
My point, if I have one, is that we only seem to care about these things after tragedy happens, but I am not sure how much will change.
101 comments
[ 7.7 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadhttps://imgur.com/user/alphastructural/posts
[1]: https://insidethemagic.net/2021/06/disney-world-massive-sink...
I found it was 432 Park Avenue.
Wow, even thinner than a thin cigarette...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue
I would not want to live in a building like that. I am quite satisfied with our one-story 1500 square foot house.
https://karstwaters.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/US_KARST_...
The parties were ordered into mediation last May, according to a Miami-Dade court docket.
A parallel federal lawsuit between Crestview Towers and the insurer says damage from Hurricane Irma was $8.1 million.
Yes, let's evacuate a building that requires $8M of repairs.
The homeowners are out of luck until a claim is made on the master insurance policy.
This shouldn't actually be a problem because that's what the master policy is for but it sounds like something has gone wrong with making a claim.
Property owners will naturally balk at steep repair bills. Regulations exist to ensure that essential repairs happen in spite of that reluctance.
One example is SuperFund sites.
And a smaller example is large cities and things like bedbugs or other infestations. If the owner doesn't act, the city will call an exterminator and put a lien on the building.
https://crestviewtowers.com/
It’s like a different world with these HOAs. Lots of corruption and red tape and hiding behind procedures. I hope these situations call to light the severe issues in this area with HOA / property management companies. Gross negligence seems to be a lot more common than you’d ever guess. This is based on first hand conversations to supplement my own experience.
There may not be anywhere for them to go. Right now, FL rental ads are getting 400 applicants per day per property - and there aren't many new ads.
source: I'm a FL renter whose rental is being sold.
I used to live in WPB about 4 years ago. It wasn't that bad to find a rental at the time
>I used to live in WPB about 4 years ago. It wasn't that bad to find a rental at the time
The rental shortage just started this year. As bad as it is, I see it getting much worse as eviction moratoriums expire.
Must be a good time to be a real estate agent.
> Must be a good time to be a real estate agent.
Yes and no. They're facing the same shortages as everyone else.
> The city is working with Red Cross and a local homelessness organization to house those unable to find other shelter.
> She said the 156-unit complex was occupied primarily by Latino residents, some of whom were very elderly. “They’re crying, they’re afraid for their future, afraid about what to do with the furniture,” she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/02/crestview-n...
This seems unnecessarily cruel
My guess is that officials will find shelters full up, as this has been in play for a number of months now. At least the rental crisis will finally show up on someone's radar - not that they'll have any power to help.
For more local flavor, the head of the Fort Lauderdale Public Works department quit today:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sun-sentinel.com/local/brow...
It shouldn't take horrific accidents for us to suddenly decide to care about structural safety.
All economic systems begin and end with the lament "if only we had more money, we could do it right."
In this case it's hard to say someone else was to blame, because the principals had mostly not delegated the decision, they were literally deciding with their own lives at stake. If it were some principal agent problem you'd find a common excuse: it's the agents fault, they chose in their own interest and not the principals.
And yet somehow they didn't decide to repair the building. So yes, even though we had a bunch of free adults with years to make the decision and the lowest interest rates ever, they didn't fix a thing that represents a catastrophic risk to themselves.
No doubt someone will dig deeper into this and find some way the market was impeded, ideological wars being what they are, but it's hard to see how that would explain away the casual observation that people had the agency to avoid getting killed here.
Note that I'm not arguing for more government control over these things, that tends to create an agency problem. Just puzzled over how it could get to this, and a bit questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.
I suggest putting this into context of all the buildings in the US. This is an exceedingly rare event. Perhaps the very fact that buildings are so safe in the US lulled the residents into a false sense of security.
For example, when an earthquake hits a third world city, half the city falls down. When an earthquake hits a US city, the damage is light.
I remember the Nisqually quake here 20 years ago. The ground was rocking and rolling making it risky to walk, poles were swinging, and buildings were swaying. But there was very little damage.
Back in the 80's I was in Tokyo and woke up to an earthquake. I mentioned it at work the next day, and the reaction of the workers there was "so what".
The common factor here is that the warnings were ignored by humans. Creatures that reached the peak of their evolution on the plains of Africa.
Whilst masters of the earth, our cognition just isn’t tuned to dealing with low-probability high-consequence events that may occur on a time scale outside our life spans.
In this case the negative event was a black swan event. The board and residents were required to correctly understand the risk of failure to remediate problems in this specific building. Who does an in-depth analysis of risk of building failure when renting or buying a property? Not a single person correctly identified that a collapse was imminent.
The other problem with rare events is that you can ignore them most of the time and not suffer any consequences. If there is a one in a thousand chance of something bad happening, and addressing that risk will cost you your job, or money, or your reputation then 99.9% of the time you incur that cost unnecessarily. That means that an entity that addresses risk becomes less competitive than a (lucky) company who doesn't.
If you increase the market size, then a lot of these complaints go away. Assessing risk of collapse across a hundred thousand buildings, like an insurance company might do, is much easier. If buildings were maintained by corporations that controlled many properties, people could avoid companies with poor track records.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/majority-of-fl...
We've needed new roofs for years. We got bids, but by the time that the HOA could meet, the bids already were too old. We voted to charge everyone based off the cost of the bids + 10%. We had owners that didn't pay or owners that paid too late. Our bids expired again and then we had some safety issues that we had to handle. So now we didn't have enough money for the roofs again, but likewise people wanted other stuff done.
It took nearly 5 years for us to finally get new roofs. Covid happened and prices went up again, but thankfully we had enough to cover stuff. Actually, only some of the roofs are currently done. 6 buildings: 3 done/3 not. <50 units total. I cannot imagine how much more complicated it would be with a bunch of units.
Oh and in a system where health insurance really cared about prevention, they'd pay for everyone's gym memberships.
If it’s free why not sign up, maybe someday I’ll use it. Maybe not
Edit: decrease the amount done as a percentage of signups. Perhaps the growth in signups would make up for the percentage drop in aggregate terms. Ie flood the gym with memberships and only find one more person actually working out
I'd say we could trade away the feeling that we could spend the money elsewhere for the lives of all the people who were killed.
I'd like to pay lower taxes, and have them spent on different things. Such as reliable infrastructure instead of 20-year wars. (And a pony.)
I can't believe we don't have any successful politicians who campaign on the promise of higher taxes and an end to all credits, deductions, and exclusions for everyone. It feels like it isn't sellable at all.
You don't know what you don't know. And disasters happen. After Hurricane Andrew, we learned from studying what broke, and made major improvements to building codes. Same thing will happen here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_building_...
That building was reported under the same safety industry and regulations, and nothing was done. We know intellectually, just as before, what happens to buildings with structural failures: they collapse. The difference is that we quickly forget the emotional or cultural awareness of the problem, and only care about these issues for as long as that news cycle lasts.
Building codes are written in blood, as they have always been.
Found unsafe but still inhabited until another building collapsed. Yet more third world conditions in the USA.
What do people normally do to check if a building is facing a possibility of collapse in the near future? I don't think I've seen anyone poking around at most buildings I've occupied before to check for structural integrity.
I foresee collapsing buildings becoming more and more of an issue for fast erected buildings from the past 50 or so years
Slightly an aside but I believe that is part of the reason why leases in Singapore are often 99 years - because the government doesn't plan for them to last beyond then
Build new housing development
Sell all properties on it with 99 year leases
When 50 years to go on lease conduct on block sale (maybe developer pays)
Demolish and rebuild and restart 99 year lease cycle
This keeps construction industry active on scarce land resource
Keeps buildings fresh with latest materials and engineering principles
Gives property owners an exit on their 99 year lease so household wealth doesn't evaporate
Strategy folds when Singapore is no longer a desirable place to invest/build
Not anything this tall. Mid to high rises weren’t really possible until very recently historically speaking.
Also don’t forget that you’re literally hitting survivor bias here. Of course the old buildings still standing in Europe are the good construction, all of the others are gone.
Although the prevalence of old housing across the UK suggests (to me at least) that something systematic has changed. The fact that people can have an obsession with tudor, georgian, Victorian style housing tells me that things were built to last in a way that might be less true today.
As you say, the technology to build so high is a recent one, I note the Empire State Building is only 80 years old which is pretty young when compared against Notre Dame for example
This is tragic, but hopefully a wake up call. Condos aren’t managed the way other large buildings are. Structural engineers are catching the problems on inspection it seems, but perhaps have too little power to actually make the call on mandating maintenance and/or evacuation.
Deferred maintenance by PG&E, well, the complete lack of maitenance caused the camp fire, the most deadly and destructive fire in California history, in 2018. And freight rail lines are handled much the same way—a major derailment at the wrong place causing catastrophic loss of life is just waiting to happen.
My point, if I have one, is that we only seem to care about these things after tragedy happens, but I am not sure how much will change.