So, the residents were expected to pony up the $15 million for repairs? https://www.nydailynews.com/news/na...0210629-gzwpv26amjclriz3sgi3pzhsfa-story.html
Welcome to home ownership. It was a condo, so a special assessment would have been charged against each owner based on square footage, etc. They probably could have gone after the builder who did the shit work before this happened, but yeah. Probably $400k per unit. It sucks, but that's what they signed up for. My parents were property managers for years, and Dad specialized in RFPs, or Reserve Fund Plans, which were hardly ever done by condos, until it became the law recently. None of them really did any proper long term maintenance or financial planning for their condos, and treated them like they were renting. More than a few got huge surprises when their roofs rotted out and they had nothing saved up to replace them, or elevators needed rebuilding, or other big common element repairs or maintenance came up. When buying a condo, seeing how well it's being managed is a key part of that equation so you don't get fucked over after you buy.
Those guys are dead. So their estates maybe? Regardless, this is gonna be a legal nightmare. Relatives of the deceased won't like to hear that their dead parents were actually the ones on the hook for the repairs.
The very idea of claiming "ownership" over a property with no land, and shared walls, is something I've opposed on principle for as long as I've been an adult. Being responsible for the building maintenance, too? Oh fuck no.
this. When I was first looking to buy a home, I was initially looking at condos because they were cheaper, and I thought at first, easier. But then I realized the maintenance side of things, and that some fuck head on the floor above me could cause flooding issues for me. So I got an old house on a small piece of land that was beat up, but at least it was MINE.
If the HOA refused to set something up to account for repairs, that's one more entry on my list of reasons why HOAs can die in a fire. If the owners decided collectively that they'd rather not pay for maintenance on property that I've seen valued at over a million dollars per condo, then they absolutely had this coming. I mean, if my car's engine blew out and I got into a wreck that killed me because I was too cheap to change the oil, no reasonable person would hold Honda responsible.
The first lesson home owners need to learn is that EVERYTHING wears out eventually, and that means it will require replacing. I will own a house until an age where it becomes physically impossible for me. I want as much say and control over my own domain as possible. I have no idea why anybody would willingly sign into a HOA. With the reputation they have presently I wonder why they even still exist at all.
I lived in a condo for about 6.5yrs. My building was built in 1974 and about a year after I moved in the HOA hit all owners with a special assessment to pay for a $2.1mil repair to the parking garage. I thought I'd done my due diligence, the building had a plans built to update common areas, gut and update the elevators, etc., but the special assessment was out of the blue. Plus the monthly HOA fees increased by about $75 each year. I don't intend to ever live in a condo again. My neighborhood has a HOA, but its $100 per month and it takes care of the common landscaping areas, trash pickup, etc. It could be better, but it also keeps some of the more idiotic neighbors from doing dumb shit that will lower my property value.
In NC, to get a condo plat recorded, an engineer has to certify that the building was built according to plan and with appropriate materials. Our county didn't enforce this for a long time. All of a sudden they sent one of my plats back, said it needed the certification put on it. Understandably, none of our PEs would sign it. So I went looking for the architect that designed the buildings. It came out that the developer hired a city planning department employee to design the buildings. He didn't want to sign them either, because he didn't inspect any of the construction process either. The developers eventually forced him to sign it, one way or another. It seemed scandalous at the time. I used to be good at catching mistakes on big building designs. I could redline the crap out of approved building plans. I especially liked the time an elevator shaft on a downtown highrise was too small for the elevator in the details. It wasn't as simple as picking a smaller elevator, they had to redo the plans. Probably something to do with elevator capacity regs for a building that big. Most of the time it was funny stuff like that, every now and then it was more serious. I was always the first person that had to make sure the plans would actually work in real life as I put them in our site plan drawings for construction staking. I saved everyone a lot of money and trouble catching bullshit like that before any construction started.
If your HOA gives you shit, just get into HAM radios and put up a massive antenna. HOAs can’t do anything about it.
I must be crazy or something but I love condo life. We live in a medium sized glob of townhouse style condos and I haven’t had any real issues yet. There was a small extra assessment recently when they redid the siding, but it was only like $30/month for a year since it had mostly been budgeted for. Our HOA fees aren’t too bad, the snow is always shoveled and plowed before I leave for work in the winter, the yards are reasonably well kept, and the HOA is responsive but otherwise very hands off. I guess we just got lucky?
I've been reading up on the Florida collapse. It just sounds like a sad deal all around. The consultant engineer hired to do the re-certification had warned them in 2018 of potential structural issues that should be addressed for fear of "exponentially more damage." Looks like the building ownership was pro-active with the re-cert process (a good sign) and tendered out the consultation package in 2020. It was awarded to the guy who did the 2018 report, but one of the other engineers who tendered it said that his visual inspection of the property showed no signs of anything more or less significant than what is common to the area. The rebar-rot they're talking about (corrosion from salt water that rusts the rebar and causes the concrete to spall) would apparently be highly visible and not something that would creep up on you. From a completely outside perspective, it sounds like the building ownership was doing what they were required to do. The engineers who examined the structure - and it looks like they could only do visual checks, no destructive-testing methods used or ultrasound - saw it to be fairly typical with maintenance as required for a 40-year old building*. "Needs a new roof, needs the pool structure redone, and some of these footings look like they could use repair." That adds up quick (a roof of that size could easily be $2M, never mind the concrete work). So the building knew about some extent of it and was in the process of getting the repair designed and the framework in place to pay for it, and BOOM. My guess, purely from the news reports and the videos, is that they're going to find an external contributing factor. There's construction in the area, so it wouldn't be uncommon for the heavy equipment to cause vibrations. That wouldn't have brought the structure down, but if anyone nearby had a broken water main or a hose that wasn't shut off, there would be your sinkhole right there. And those fuckers have almost no warning. They're either there, or they're not. So there's a whole mass of devastated families and probably every professional ever associated with the project hasn't slept in over ten days. This could turn out to be that everyone did everything mostly correct, but the stars lined up and created a disaster. I almost hope they find a failure of maintenance or design. The alternative - that the soil conditions allowed a sinkhole - would mean that absolutely nothing could be done to prevent it happening elsewhere. Such a sad and scary thing. *EDIT: the contracted engineer actually observed noticeable changes over the last two years, and urged that repairs be executed at once. Still, though, what he was seeing didn't indicate to him that the structure be condemned or evacuated. The HOA was in the process of having all the repairs tendered.
So...one of the most prolific rapists of the 20th century gets to go home now. Yay. What an excellent message and harsh punishment.
And the chick from Smallville got 3 years after helping some cult leader with sex trafficking. Not a great day to be a victim.
It sucks because it’s based more on prosecutorial shenanigans than whether he’s actually guilty or not.
Unless you can dig up a Minneapolis DA that told Chauvin he wouldn't be prosecuted for choking people to death and therefore didn't have 5th Amendment protections while being sued over it, I doubt the Cosby defense will fly.
Not making a comment on the merits just did not expect a case this big to go down when I saw the headline pop up. Just kind of credulous about it.
I'm just shocked they haven't piled on more charges against Cosby since he went away, just to ensure no appeal could free him. Dude has dozens of accusers, I have to imagine they could make a case on at least one of them.