In my region, there is a style of house known as a “one half duplex”, so not completely bonkers.
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Low Overhead!
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My condo HOA spent several years suing the developer for construction defects, resulting in a judgement of tens of millions of dollars.
They have a legal obligation to use that money to fix the defects, but that can wait. In the meantime the money is used to lower the monthly HOA payments, and less and less is available for the deferred maintenance.
Having lived under several HOAs and gone to board meetings, it seems this proclivity towards deferring any expenses possible is just human nature. People always want to kick the can down the road, and think they will have moved on by the time the bill comes due. It actually is a rational approach if you are a libertarian cost externalizer. The board members tend to have the best sense of when moving makes more sense than facing the music.
One HOA I lived in actually did it right. They hired an independent company to make a spreadsheet of every deferred maintenance, along with when it was due and what it would cost. Then a financial plan was made that adjusts dues high enough that there will be reserves available when the maintenance came due.
If I ever live in another HOA, I will make sure they already have such a plan and it is being followed.
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Looking at the dying palm trees and vines behind the jacuzzi, do you think chlorine leaching away from the building into the soil could cause that?
I’d be interested in knowing how many of the units were rentals. Where I live the condos with higher tenancy rates have a much harder time getting capital projects through; people are much more motivated to prevent problems in a building when they actually live there.
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One interesting facet of Florida’s condominium law is that condos can be dissolved if 80 percent of the owners agree-- so developers have been known to buy units with an eye towards dissolving the agreements and using the land for something more commercially lucrative. Once they garner 50 percent of the vote, they can seize control of the board and start raising assessments. Until they can reach that threshold, their units are rented out.
But it’s probably safer to assume that most of the units were owner occupied until proven otherwise.
Makes sense (to me).
Possible chain of events: some of the floor slabs fail1). This means that the columns in that area lose their lateral support against buckling. Their effective buckling length more or less doubles. Even without increasing the overall load this means that the design load of those columns is exceeded - not because the load as such changes, but because the static system of the structure has changed.
Suddenly those columns have to perform in a way they were never designed for.
And the most likely point where those columns are to fail anyway (about half way up) is also the point where the failed slabs used to be, and the slabs’ collapse is bound to have damaged the columns, weakening them.
1) Possibly because the punching shear reinforcement connecting the slabs and the columns had rusted away and failed. There is bound to be a concrete joint between the top of the floor slab and the rising columns. You’d pour the lower column, then the slab, then the next column, and so on. Such a concrete joint is just a tiny gap, bur anything wider than 1/10 mm will let water seep in. And apparently there were puddles between the top of the concrete slab and the tiles for years and years.
Yes, early days armchair analysis based on 3rd hand data and from almost 8k kilometres away, to be taken with more than just a grain of salt, but the pieces just fit together very well that way.
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Thar reminds me of the Sampoong Department Store collapse in Seoul, which IIRC was mentioned in another thread.
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