John D. MacDonald predicted this back in 1977

Fraud, shoddy construction, crooked politicians, danger!

2021: Two-thirds of Miami condo buildings are older than 30 years. The repair bills are coming due.

I read the book when it came out and about a decade later, when one of my jobs as a young legal associate was to attend condominium board meetings and (try to) keep the blood from spattering too badly, I was many times reminded of MacDonald’’s scary tale. Everything in this article jibes with my own experience. And though the Journal focuses on Miami, I’m confident the same situation prevails across the country. Getting a majority of owners to vote for even routine maintenance is tough — major structural repairs? Hoo boy — bring a raincoat.

In the Miami region, two out of every three condo buildings are more than 30 years old, according to data compiled by real-estate data firm Zillow for The Wall Street Journal. In at least seven other Florida cities, some three-quarters of condo buildings have hit that age.

Many of the aging towers line the beachfront, where salt corrosion and other forces are speeding their decline. That is leaving thousands of buildings saddled with multimillion-dollar repair costs—and little notion of how to pay for them.

It often takes as little as 20 years for many building materials, including stucco, windows and shingles, to reach the end of what engineers and building inspectors call their "useful life"—industry jargon for materials that need replacement or significant repair.

Nationwide, more than half of all condo buildings have stood at least three decades, according to Zillow. Coastal cities have among the largest shares of such aging buildings. In Miami, nearly 40% of the housing stock is condos, the highest of any major metropolitan area in the U.S., according to Zillow.

Building inspectors must approve most condo buildings before the first residents move in, but oversight after that is limited in most U.S. counties.

Typically, local authorities leave decision-making to individual condo boards. Those organizations usually are made up of unpaid volunteers with little or no professional experience as building managers or engineers. They must decide what repairs are needed, and persuade owners, often part-time residents, elderly and on fixed incomes, to drain their savings or take on debt to cover the tab.

James Prichard, a Florida-based construction lawyer at Ball Janik LLP, works with condo boards across the state. He said he has found myriad property damage issues, including defects in construction and problems in financial management.

"You have these complicated buildings that were very expensive to build, very expensive to buy, and they’re handed to the ordinary homeowners who are now in charge of maintaining them forever," he said.

For condo towers with decades of deferred maintenance, the cost to repair leaking roofs, cracking concrete pillars and listing balconies can reach millions of dollars, an amount that few buildings have on hand, construction attorneys and structural engineers said. Shortly before Champlain Towers South collapsed, the board president told residents that costs for needed repairs, including concrete restoration work, had reached more than $15 million.

The article is much too long to do it justice in just a blog excerpt, but I recommend reading it in its entirety. And read “Condominium” — it’s a good read, as well as being discouragingly informative for current or would-be condo owners.