SURFSIDE, Fla. — Ines Mason bought the 14th-floor condo, perched on an island in Biscayne Bay, five years ago as a getaway, lured by the captivating view of the water. “In the morning, the sun rises, you can see that,” she said. “It’s amazing.”
“No one ever asked about a 40-year recertification before,” Ines Hegedus-Garcia, a real estate agent with Avanti Way Realty in South Florida, said of the process of assessing the structural condition of buildings constructed decades ago. “Nobody ever did that, but buyers are now asking for that.” But over time, a gulf has separated many of those developments, a disparity created by differences in upkeep and oversight. The divergence is easy to spot: There are the older complexes with pillars scarred with cracks and parking garages whose ceilings are splotched with patchwork fixes. And then there are other similarly aged buildings, experts said, that barely show their age.
There are more than 50,000 community associations governing condos and subdivisions in Florida, among the most in the nation. But many of those associations have been mired in apathy, as residents have been unable or unwilling to take on the task of running their residences. “Often, we’ll have more vacancies on a board than willing candidates,” Moore said.
Those sites also have had to reckon with the added costs of living in a coastal environment, like shifting sediment, subsidence and the corrosive effect of saltwater. “This is the first generation in the postwar period, thinking that we can engineer around the forces of nature,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor studying housing and climate adaptation at Tulane University. “These buildings are reaching the end of their useful life.
“It’s getting harder and harder to find what I could consider a legitimate company to come in and write a building like those,” he said, referring to insurers willing to cover such sites.
Strange, no building has collapsed just like that at any beach resort in Mexico. Cancun, Acapulco where powerful earthquakes take place. What kind of engineers build those Miami express condos. These ones are much older.
Over 90% of Florida is false nwo documents of ownership to sold to purchase illegally develop fast enough to get stupid people to believe bad is good and good is bad construction since invading the state in the mid late 1970s attacking the farmers,tourism,forestry,fishing,markets