Our small HoA was stuck with owning the under street sewage and water system because 20 years ago it didn’t meet city code. So the builder made it part of the HoA. Nobody can find documentation of sketchiness 20 years ago, and the original owners were less worried about what might happen decades down the line. Sigh…
Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#42Florida, like all the other states that have a lot of condos (New York, Hawaii, Illinois, etc), have their own laws and do not follow the uniform condo laws that other states have. The laws of these states are responses to problems they have seen with condos in their own states. Florida is going to learn a lot from this tower collapse and will pass a bunch of laws to try to prevent this from happening again. It will…
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Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#43This has given me serious pause on buying a condo. If I rent the moment I have unfixed issues I can leave ( breaking a lease is pretty easy in my experience). But I'd hate to buy and then deal with bad neighbors or building issues
I would strongly advise against buying a condo in the current environment. I am fighting to have structural issues with a building I own a unit in dealt with, and it's quite the thing.
One of the things I find amazing is how unclear the declarations of responsibility are. For instance, there's common elements, which the association is responsible for, and limited common elements, which are elements that you are responsible for, but the association can demand you fix as needed for the benefit of the building whole. I think there's a third category of building limited common elements. Also, I have a garage, but it's not actually mine, I own the right to exclusive use of it, but not the garage itself, but I also end up on the hook for repairs when it breaks...
What's fun about that is associations basically place the unit owner responsible for all the likely-to-need-work elements that are exterior. Like windows and the balcony, despite both being exterior building elements, the latter made of the same structural concrete as the rest of the building. But if they need to resurface the balcony, you're going to pay for it, and they're just going to tell you how much you have to pay, or else. (I believe my grandmother once got a $15,000 bill for the balcony at her place, and that's just a mandatory special assessment the association can decide to employ. Good luck if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck.)
And then there's just stuff that's completely unlisted in the terms: Building structure is the association's problem, the drywall is generally defined as a unit owner's problem. You know what isn't mentioned at all: Insulation, which is outside the drywall, but not structural. The building can probably refuse to deal with it, and your insurance company can probably refuse to cover it.
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#44So, condos aren't that old in the US. Is there some similar structure in another country with older urban housing stock that works better? For demographic, environmental and economic reasons, it seems like more people will and should be living in cities with some density, so we need _some_ well-functioning arrangement for ownership for something other than single family homes. Is there not some country with a lot of…
In older urban areas in the US (particularly NYC), you often see co-op buildings. In a co-op, you buy shares in a corporation that owns the building and get a proprietary lease entitling you to use of a certain amount of space, while in a condo you are buying the deed to the individual apartment you own.
On paper they're different means to the same end. In practice, condos typically have much less stringent approval requirements - board approvals, background checks, character references, and providing a summary of your complete financial situation beyond the details of how you'll be paying for the apartment are normal in a coop purchase process.
The result of this is co-ops tend to have lower turnover and stricter rules overall - in addition to often being cheaper. They also have their problems, because the approvals process can be a mechanism for discrimination against protected classes. But the general perception is that co-ops are harder to get into, and harder to get out of, so the residents (at least in theory) tend to be long term and community minded. In most states, condo boards don't get the right to be selective, and must accept the first applicant who is minimally qualified.
Condos tend to give more power to the individual owner, coops tend to give more power to the coop board.
I can't speak to how other parts of the world handle this problem, but even in the US there is at least one other common model.
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#45My townhouse community just found out about a construction defect that was causing water damage to some homes (some flashing was never installed). The builder is long-gone, having merged a couple of times over the years into one of the big national firms and is not able to be sued.
The board engaged the community's law firm to look into whether the community needed to be the one to pay for repairs or whether it should be left to the individual owners. [0]
The law firm did some truly amazing hair-splitting and decided that the inner part of the walls started at the inside of the brick & vinyl, and not with the wood sheathing underneath them, which is where the flashing would have been fastened.
So the good news is I'm not going to be hit with an assessment. The bad news is the board had the community's lawyers draft a finding against their own community. [1]
[0] Ordinarily in townhouses & condos, the owner is responsible for repairs to the inner part of the walls, and often the exterior windows & doors. You know this when you buy the house.
[1] Which is actually correct - the law firm's clients are the board, representing the community. Not the community itself. Doesn't change that it stinks.
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#46I sat on my condo board for a decade and was president for two years. My experience is that the board is not the problem - the non board sitting owners are. Our complex was comprised of 5 separate 3 story buildings. Three of those building had bad water leaking problems but when we tried to raise money for repairs - the people who weren't suffering any interior water damage wouldn't vote yes. Many buyers don't read t…
"Nobody wants to pay for what is a collective problem." Yet they choose to live in a collective structure. It's essentially another level of government entered into via contract. Maybe they should choose to live in an independent residence if they didn't want that.
Although it's not that easy. Now the choice is either just rent or buy a single family home (which they may not be able to afford where they live). Eliminating the condo option forecloses ownership for many--and, for those who strongly advocate for urban density--disperses people over a much larger area.
But collective structures are difficult at all scales. Some people have a fair bit of money and want issues, even just aesthetic ones, fixed now. And others are probably living paycheck to paycheck.
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#47I sat on my condo board for a decade and was president for two years. My experience is that the board is not the problem - the non board sitting owners are. Our complex was comprised of 5 separate 3 story buildings. Three of those building had bad water leaking problems but when we tried to raise money for repairs - the people who weren't suffering any interior water damage wouldn't vote yes. Many buyers don't read t…
> There could easily be a formula of like 10% of annual dues
I was on the board of a 10 unit condo building. The annual budget for the association was ~$60k. We had a reserve provision of 10% of dues, plus whatever was leftover in the budget at the end of the year.
Even with that budgeting provision we had several additional assessments over the course of a decade. Those assessments were used to address roof issues and interior renovations.
If something more structural had come up, that would have led to another (large) assessment, for sure.
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#48I sat on my condo board for a decade and was president for two years. My experience is that the board is not the problem - the non board sitting owners are. Our complex was comprised of 5 separate 3 story buildings. Three of those building had bad water leaking problems but when we tried to raise money for repairs - the people who weren't suffering any interior water damage wouldn't vote yes. Many buyers don't read t…
Experienced something similar to with my previous home's HOA in south Seattle. New chairperson took over the HOA and found out that the rainy day accounts were woefully underfunded and several shared roofs were in need of repairs, so dues had to be increased pretty dramatically.
The frustrating part for me as a homeowner was that dues were assessed based on square footage, but out of 200+ homes, ours was one of the only 15 or so that were fully detached. We had use of a communal driveway we shared with 5 neighbors as well as a small private park 2/3rds of a mile down the road, but other than that, we were fully responsible for all of our unshared infrastructure. If our roof had a problem we had to fix it at our own expense, even though we paid in to the roof repair fund.
There were were many more homes (ie. a city or a country instead of a neighborhood) or if there was a greater variety of homes (ie. a larger percentage of detached homes) or if there was some obvious wealth disparity (ie. our detached home wasn't smaller than many of the attached homes) or some other mitigating factors, I'd have been happy to pay in on the assumption that "what goes around comes around" and "rising tide raises all ships", but in this case, my partner and I felt pretty cheated. That said, we didn't make a stink. We just paid the damn dues (...and then later moved somewhere without an HOA).
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#49"Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs" As are local governments, county governments, and state governments unless they get a big grant from the level of government above them. Even federal infrastructure is in disrepair. My locality had to redo the main street and the water and sewer lines under it. We had to get a grant from the state and they also put a 40% surcharge on our water bills to pay…
IMO the headline should say, "Years of corporate bailouts, military bloat and tax cuts have devastated the US's ability to maintain even the most basic of infrastructure"
Re: Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
#50I sat on my condo board for a decade and was president for two years. My experience is that the board is not the problem - the non board sitting owners are. Our complex was comprised of 5 separate 3 story buildings. Three of those building had bad water leaking problems but when we tried to raise money for repairs - the people who weren't suffering any interior water damage wouldn't vote yes. Many buyers don't read t…
"Nobody wants to pay for what is a collective problem." Yet they choose to live in a collective structure. It's essentially another level of government entered into via contract. Maybe they should choose to live in an independent residence if they didn't want that.
It's a nasty sentiment that's inculcated into virtually all Americans since birth; any problem beyond our property line we don't give a fuck about. Hilariously ironic of course for people that choose to buy property in a building owned by someone else.