SURFSIDE, Fla. — Elena Blasser kept her two-bedroom, two-bath condo in the Champlain Towers South as a beachside gathering place for family reunions. She adored the ocean and the small town of Surfside, Fla., because they reminded her of homes in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
She sank at least $100,000 into renovations when she bought Penthouse 11 a little more than a decade ago. Then the complex’s problems began. Hairline cracks in the pool deck. Newly painted walls that chipped easily. Water pooling in the garage. To pay for it all, the monthly maintenance fees and special assessments grew.
“We’re paying those fees and where are they going?” Ms. Blasser, a 64-year-old former schoolteacher, kept telling her family and neighbors, according to her son Pablo Rodriguez.
Little did she know that the problems identified in the building were about to get much worse. A consultant’s report commissioned in 2018 had identified serious problems of crumbling concrete and corroded rebar — problems that engineers warned had already led to “major structural damage.”
Fixing it, the condo board eventually concluded, would cost an estimated $15 million. Ms. Blasser would have to come up with another $120,000 to pay her share.
Long before half of the Champlain Towers South crumpled to the ground on June 24, killing at least 24 people and leaving up to 121 unaccounted for — including Ms. Blasser and her mother, Elena Chavez, 88 — the rancor over how the building was run by its condominium association was an open secret known to the relatives and friends of the people who lived there, and even to residents of other nearby buildings.
Pablo Rodriguez said his mother, Elena Blasser, broke into tears when she was asked to pay another special assessment.
It coexisted with the joys of the otherwise congenial community of condo dwellers who had been sold on the Florida dream of waterfront bliss. Emma Guara, 4, would stop John Turis, 76, by the pool to play with Leela, his Cavalier King Charles spaniel, when he was in town from Brooklyn. Ana and Juan Mora would swing by a neighbor’s unit on the 10th floor to see if she needed anything. Younger residents would look out for older ones when they waded into the ocean.
By the time the board members entrusted by their neighbors with overseeing the building hired an engineer to tell them what they had long suspected — that their aging condo was in dire need of top-to-bottom repairs — the meetings at the 13-story complex had developed a toxic reputation.
“People said, ‘Oh my God, thank God you’re not at the board meeting,’” Sharon Schechter recalled. “‘There’s screaming and yelling.’”
Tense stalemates delayed any decisions as the board became a hothouse of grievance over who was to blame, according to interviews with survivors of the collapse, former residents, relatives of the missing, lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times.
Ms. Blasser’s frustration grew each year, Mr. Rodriguez said. In 2017, she paid $60,000 for a special assessment to help make repairs. Then came the latest one, Mr. Rodriguez said, breaking into tears.
“She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe we have to do this again,’” he said.
In April, fed up, Ms. Blasser reached out to a real estate agent about selling her condo and was told it would sell quickly for close to a million dollars.
The 2018 engineering report from Frank P. Morabito, the consulting engineer, was deeply troubling. He gave no indication that the structure was at risk of failing, but he estimated that repairs would cost more than $9 million.
“Sadly a few of our residents have undermined our progress with petty challenges, discrediting the board members and management,” they said.
Mr. Turis, a real estate and mortgage broker in New York who bought Unit 409 in 2005 so his daughter could live in it while she attended college, said the building had been mired in turnover of board members and property managers.
“It was like nobody wanted the job,” he said. “It seemed like nobody ever lasted more than two years.”
On Sept. 13, 2019, Graciela M. Escalante, who chaired the committee in charge of the 40-year recertification project, recommended hiring Mr. Morabito’s firm to carry out the work, even though his bid was the most expensive and initially led to what the selection committee admitted was “sticker shock.”
The next day, Anette Goldstein, the board president, and Nancy K. Levin, the vice president, both resigned, saying they were frustrated by last-minute objections that kept derailing progress on repairs.
“This pattern has repeated itself over and over, ego battles, undermining the roles of fellow board members, circulation of gossip and mistruths,” Ms. Goldstein wrote. “I am not presenting a very pretty picture of the functioning of our board and many before us, but it describes a board that works very hard but cannot for the reasons above accomplish the goals we set to accomplish.”
In all, six of seven board members resigned, five of them in the two weeks leading up to Oct. 3, 2019. At a board meeting that day, Ms. Escalante and others laid out a slew of concerns. She was elected the new president and, as the building official for the neighboring village of Bal Harbour, she had real expertise for the job.
“The building is falling apart,” he wrote to the board the following month, accusing the previous members of prioritizing renovations to common-area bathrooms over structural repairs.
“Somebody can seriously be injured or killed with the state of the concrete,” he wrote.
Ms. Escalante did not last long. She resigned on Dec. 15, 2019, citing health concerns, and sold her condo nine months later.
‘We should have started saving at least five years ago’
New board members took over in 2020 and managed to do what none of their predecessors had: They secured a $15 million line of credit to pay for the repairs identified by Mr. Morabito in 2018. The project’s cost had grown upon closer inspection and as time passed.
In a series of slide show presentations, the board bluntly laid out the reality. “We should have started saving at least five years ago,” said one from May 28, 2020. An October 2020 presentation said further inspections had shown that the waterproofing problems over the garage were far more widespread than initially thought: “This has exposed the garage to water intrusion for 40 years.”
Despite its financial challenges, the building, with its close-up view of the South Florida surf, was desirable in the booming market, according to Andres Paredes, a real estate agent involved in a 2020 unit sale.
The condo management openly released details of the planned multimillion-dollar restoration to prospective buyers, he said. Even with the assessments that would surely be needed to cover the cost of repairs, Unit 202 seemed like a good investment to a New York couple. The price was $460,000.
Longtime residents, like Ms. Blasser, had already borne the brunt of repeated special assessments for other repairs. One of them, which had been intended for hallway renovations in 2016, had instead been repurposed to address budget shortfalls and help finance the big 40-year repairs.
They would have to dig deep for more money: Each unit would have to pay between $80,000 and about $200,000, either up front or in monthly installments.
No one was happy about it.
“It’s an upscale building, but it’s not the Ritz or the Four Seasons,” he said. “The people that live there aren’t Rockefellers or Rothschilds. We’re upper middle class, I guess, and a lot of us are retired.”
When a neighbor knocked on his door, 705, with a petition against the assessment, Mr. Rosenthal signed it. The first payment was due on July 1.
Interesting NYT article about their struggle to agree to agree to all the special assessment charges to pay for repairs. It's paywall. I'm not sure but maybe NYT's still allows a few free articles a month?
Edited: It's looks like you have to register to get your free articles. I put part of the article in behind a spoiler.
But unless the state\city\county gets more active, who is going to force the association to set aside the money and do timely repairs?
Floridians aren't really in love with having the government telling them what they have to do.
Seems like no one at any point was realistic about maintenance costs for such a building. Makes one wonder how many other ticking time bombs are sitting around the state....
srvy
07-04-2021 01:35 PM
They haven't come out and said it but the race to drop the still-standing building portion pretty much makes this a recovery.
SURFSIDE, Fla. — Elena Blasser kept her two-bedroom, two-bath condo in the Champlain Towers South as a beachside gathering place for family reunions. She adored the ocean and the small town of Surfside, Fla., because they reminded her of homes in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
She sank at least $100,000 into renovations when she bought Penthouse 11 a little more than a decade ago. Then the complex’s problems began. Hairline cracks in the pool deck. Newly painted walls that chipped easily. Water pooling in the garage. To pay for it all, the monthly maintenance fees and special assessments grew.
“We’re paying those fees and where are they going?” Ms. Blasser, a 64-year-old former schoolteacher, kept telling her family and neighbors, according to her son Pablo Rodriguez.
Little did she know that the problems identified in the building were about to get much worse. A consultant’s report commissioned in 2018 had identified serious problems of crumbling concrete and corroded rebar — problems that engineers warned had already led to “major structural damage.”
Fixing it, the condo board eventually concluded, would cost an estimated $15 million. Ms. Blasser would have to come up with another $120,000 to pay her share.
Long before half of the Champlain Towers South crumpled to the ground on June 24, killing at least 24 people and leaving up to 121 unaccounted for — including Ms. Blasser and her mother, Elena Chavez, 88 — the rancor over how the building was run by its condominium association was an open secret known to the relatives and friends of the people who lived there, and even to residents of other nearby buildings.
Pablo Rodriguez said his mother, Elena Blasser, broke into tears when she was asked to pay another special assessment.
It coexisted with the joys of the otherwise congenial community of condo dwellers who had been sold on the Florida dream of waterfront bliss. Emma Guara, 4, would stop John Turis, 76, by the pool to play with Leela, his Cavalier King Charles spaniel, when he was in town from Brooklyn. Ana and Juan Mora would swing by a neighbor’s unit on the 10th floor to see if she needed anything. Younger residents would look out for older ones when they waded into the ocean.
By the time the board members entrusted by their neighbors with overseeing the building hired an engineer to tell them what they had long suspected — that their aging condo was in dire need of top-to-bottom repairs — the meetings at the 13-story complex had developed a toxic reputation.
“People said, ‘Oh my God, thank God you’re not at the board meeting,’” Sharon Schechter recalled. “‘There’s screaming and yelling.’”
Tense stalemates delayed any decisions as the board became a hothouse of grievance over who was to blame, according to interviews with survivors of the collapse, former residents, relatives of the missing, lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times.
Ms. Blasser’s frustration grew each year, Mr. Rodriguez said. In 2017, she paid $60,000 for a special assessment to help make repairs. Then came the latest one, Mr. Rodriguez said, breaking into tears.
“She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe we have to do this again,’” he said.
In April, fed up, Ms. Blasser reached out to a real estate agent about selling her condo and was told it would sell quickly for close to a million dollars.
The 2018 engineering report from Frank P. Morabito, the consulting engineer, was deeply troubling. He gave no indication that the structure was at risk of failing, but he estimated that repairs would cost more than $9 million.
“Sadly a few of our residents have undermined our progress with petty challenges, discrediting the board members and management,” they said.
Mr. Turis, a real estate and mortgage broker in New York who bought Unit 409 in 2005 so his daughter could live in it while she attended college, said the building had been mired in turnover of board members and property managers.
“It was like nobody wanted the job,” he said. “It seemed like nobody ever lasted more than two years.”
On Sept. 13, 2019, Graciela M. Escalante, who chaired the committee in charge of the 40-year recertification project, recommended hiring Mr. Morabito’s firm to carry out the work, even though his bid was the most expensive and initially led to what the selection committee admitted was “sticker shock.”
The next day, Anette Goldstein, the board president, and Nancy K. Levin, the vice president, both resigned, saying they were frustrated by last-minute objections that kept derailing progress on repairs.
“This pattern has repeated itself over and over, ego battles, undermining the roles of fellow board members, circulation of gossip and mistruths,” Ms. Goldstein wrote. “I am not presenting a very pretty picture of the functioning of our board and many before us, but it describes a board that works very hard but cannot for the reasons above accomplish the goals we set to accomplish.”
In all, six of seven board members resigned, five of them in the two weeks leading up to Oct. 3, 2019. At a board meeting that day, Ms. Escalante and others laid out a slew of concerns. She was elected the new president and, as the building official for the neighboring village of Bal Harbour, she had real expertise for the job.
“The building is falling apart,” he wrote to the board the following month, accusing the previous members of prioritizing renovations to common-area bathrooms over structural repairs.
“Somebody can seriously be injured or killed with the state of the concrete,” he wrote.
Ms. Escalante did not last long. She resigned on Dec. 15, 2019, citing health concerns, and sold her condo nine months later.
‘We should have started saving at least five years ago’
New board members took over in 2020 and managed to do what none of their predecessors had: They secured a $15 million line of credit to pay for the repairs identified by Mr. Morabito in 2018. The project’s cost had grown upon closer inspection and as time passed.
In a series of slide show presentations, the board bluntly laid out the reality. “We should have started saving at least five years ago,” said one from May 28, 2020. An October 2020 presentation said further inspections had shown that the waterproofing problems over the garage were far more widespread than initially thought: “This has exposed the garage to water intrusion for 40 years.”
Despite its financial challenges, the building, with its close-up view of the South Florida surf, was desirable in the booming market, according to Andres Paredes, a real estate agent involved in a 2020 unit sale.
The condo management openly released details of the planned multimillion-dollar restoration to prospective buyers, he said. Even with the assessments that would surely be needed to cover the cost of repairs, Unit 202 seemed like a good investment to a New York couple. The price was $460,000.
Longtime residents, like Ms. Blasser, had already borne the brunt of repeated special assessments for other repairs. One of them, which had been intended for hallway renovations in 2016, had instead been repurposed to address budget shortfalls and help finance the big 40-year repairs.
They would have to dig deep for more money: Each unit would have to pay between $80,000 and about $200,000, either up front or in monthly installments.
No one was happy about it.
“It’s an upscale building, but it’s not the Ritz or the Four Seasons,” he said. “The people that live there aren’t Rockefellers or Rothschilds. We’re upper middle class, I guess, and a lot of us are retired.”
When a neighbor knocked on his door, 705, with a petition against the assessment, Mr. Rosenthal signed it. The first payment was due on July 1.
Interesting NYT article about their struggle to agree to agree to all the special assessment charges to pay for repairs. It's paywall. I'm not sure but maybe NYT's still allows a few free articles a month?
Edited: It's looks like you have to register to get your free articles. I put part of the article in behind a spoiler.
But unless the state\city\county gets more active, who is going to force the association to set aside the money and do timely repairs?
Floridians aren't really in love with having the government telling them what they have to do.
Interesting article. It shows the challenge of community management in that people will have different philosophies, and some people will never approve anything because they think they can freeload. The people who were blocking those repairs have a lot of blood on their hands if they're still alive.
I was briefly the president of a small condo association, and my wife and I bailed pretty quickly and moved. A majority of residents treated it like an apartment complex, and 20 percent of the homeowners did 95 percent of the work.
We also had to do an assessment to do a major boiler repair. We had a small reserve that was enough to fund it, but we had to rebuild the reserve. I remember having a resident who resisted it, saying, "The reason we have a reserve is to cover expenses like a boiler. Why should I have to pay just to rebuild the reserve?" Well, duh.
displacedinMN
07-04-2021 09:58 PM
Down about 1030 edt
eDave
07-05-2021 12:28 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by displacedinMN
(Post 15730676)
Interesting article. It shows the challenge of community management in that people will have different philosophies, and some people will never approve anything because they think they can freeload. The people who were blocking those repairs have a lot of blood on their hands if they're still alive.
The 'burst into tears woman' is missing and presumed dead.
I'm sure the survivors will have a lot of guilt. But nobody told them, as the entire article made clear several times, that the building was in any danger of collapsing.
I'm not sure a condo association is really up to the task of taking on repairs of this magnitude. You have some people on fixed incomes and others figuring they will sell their unit soon so they will oppose expensive repairs.
They aren't typically engineers or finance experts or management experts.
Sure the state/city could eventually force them to evacuate, if they have the political balls. But that screws the other owners.
You really want repairs in a timely manner when they are less costly but I don't see the government taking on that roll. By the time the structure is compromised to a safety it-might-really-fall-down, repairs are probably going to be hugely expensive.
Remind me not to buy a high rise condo in Florida. Hell, I don't even want to be part of a HOA. Just live in a decent neighborhood with a functional local government.
DaneMcCloud
07-05-2021 11:37 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigRedChief
(Post 15730359)
Condos around here built after the mid-90's and Hurricane Andrew are the safest places to be in a hurricane.
Same thing happened here after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The amount of concrete and steel required to build new homes and buildings tripled.
All of the new homes since then look like bare bones skyscrapers with the all of the steel girders used for framing. One of the new 10 story hotels going up down the street is all steel girder framing.
It’s crazy to see at a distance or up close because it looks so overbuilt, especially for ten stories, but it’ll never come down on its own.
Stewie
07-05-2021 02:24 PM
Just saw a report that this was a water issue. Lack of proper drainage around the pool and parking garage caused excessive spalling in the concrete/rebar. Over time everything becomes weak and finally fails.
The parking garage and pool equipment were underground and surface water soaked all things structural. Even concrete and rebar fail when constantly exposed to water.
Rain Man
07-05-2021 02:31 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chief Pagan
(Post 15730887)
The 'burst into tears woman' is missing and presumed dead.
I'm sure the survivors will have a lot of guilt. But nobody told them, as the entire article made clear several times, that the building was in any danger of collapsing.
I'm not sure a condo association is really up to the task of taking on repairs of this magnitude. You have some people on fixed incomes and others figuring they will sell their unit soon so they will oppose expensive repairs.
They aren't typically engineers or finance experts or management experts.
Sure the state/city could eventually force them to evacuate, if they have the political balls. But that screws the other owners.
You really want repairs in a timely manner when they are less costly but I don't see the government taking on that roll. By the time the structure is compromised to a safety it-might-really-fall-down, repairs are probably going to be hugely expensive.
Remind me not to buy a high rise condo in Florida. Hell, I don't even want to be part of a HOA. Just live in a decent neighborhood with a functional local government.
Yeah, I'm not sure what happens if you have an assessment and someone refuses to pay or can't pay. I guess the association puts a lien on the unit, but someone still has to cover the cost up front. And some of the units in this building were facing a $300,000+ lien.
It sounds like the board was trying to get repairs and was being blocked by voting. Repairs only get more expensive over time, though.
I've briefly pondered downsizing to a condo when I retire, but this is reminding me that I don't like how condos work organizationally. I'll just stay in my house.
Stewie
07-05-2021 02:52 PM
Here's a good analysis from a structural engineers perspective.
This dude says he is an engineer yet he is referencing the garage floor parking striping diagram. He needs to dig into the structural portion of the plans and column pier layout. Another thing I noticed is he seems to not realize the subsurface parking garage is separate from the tower. The tower would require larger load-bearing columns vs a parking garage not supporting the same load.
As for concrete piers, there are bridges setting in water exposed to rivers and seawater standing near 100 years.
If this guy is an engineer he should be ashamed to put out this video with not being there relying on pictures and videos. How about waiting for the facts from real experts looking over inspection records examining rubble and the steel reinforcement in the beams and columns. It will take some time but they will figure it out maybe he is right.
Stewie
07-05-2021 06:02 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by srvy
(Post 15731175)
:LOL:
This dude says he is an engineer yet he is referencing the garage floor parking striping diagram. He needs to dig into the structural portion of the plans and column pier layout. Another thing I noticed is he seems to not realize the subsurface parking garage is separate from the tower. The tower would require larger load-bearing columns vs a parking garage not supporting the same load.
As for concrete piers, there are bridges setting in water exposed to rivers and seawater standing near 100 years.
If this guy is an engineer he should be ashamed to put out this video with not being there relying on pictures and videos. How about waiting for the facts from real experts looking over inspection records examining rubble and the steel reinforcement in the beams and columns. It will take some time but they will figure it out maybe he is right.
I think his analysis might be right even without being there.
We know the first thing to fail was the parking garage under the pool area. The woman who called her husband in a panic thought it was a sinkhole. It took a few minutes for the rest of the structure to collapse. The parking garage extended under the main structure that failed like a bunch of dominoes from what I can see.
Who knows? It will be interesting to see the final outcome.
srvy
07-05-2021 06:29 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stewie
(Post 15731232)
I think his analysis might be right even without being there.
We know the first thing to fail was the parking garage under the pool area. The woman who called her husband in a panic thought it was a sinkhole. It took a few minutes for the rest of the structure to collapse. The parking garage extended under the main structure that failed like a bunch of dominoes from what I can see.
Who knows? It will be interesting to see the final outcome.
The garage would be built under and around the tower but still independent structures. The structural column piers for the garage could be nearly butting up to structural column piers of the tower but never attached together. They are separate standing structures. This allows for any movement in the wind or expansion-contraction. I suppose the garage could fail kick and crack a tower column causing failure to the tower but I would think the opposite would be more likely.
Those tower columns would be larger and is why I called the tuber out showing the parking striping layout. A structural engineer would be scanning structural pier layout plans for the tower and garage. Well that's what a land surveyor would do since its guys like me who set the control and layout the piers
displacedinMN
07-05-2021 07:20 PM
Lady sued to halt the explosions until they searched for her cat.
Judge says no.
BigRedChief
07-05-2021 08:24 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by displacedinMN
(Post 15731310)
Lady sued to halt the explosions until they searched for her cat.
Judge says no.
our dogs are family to us. If it’s my condo still standing. I’d like them to check if my dog was alive in my condo before blowing up my condo. Infrared scan should do it?
