The Dream of Florida Is Dead: Miami condo collapse is a crisis for the state | Hacker News Reader

The Dream of Florida Is Dead: Miami condo collapse is a crisis for the state

slate.com

36 pointsASinclair19 comments

Generally, deteriorating civil engineering structures is a huge looming crisis for the U.S.

Sprawling suburbs dependent on perpetual growth to fund repairs to their streets & utilities, small economically-contracting towns dependent on highways and bridges that are falling apart, 15,000 "high hazard" dams to maintain: we are going to have to either give up on some of it, or pay for decades of missing upkeep.

specifically for florida, their entire foundation is swiss cheese. climate change will hasten their detriorating condition. their farmers will do the same.

some structural declines will take dcades, but id expect this like we now expect more frequent and stronger hurricanes.

even then, the political climate is just toxic by itself

Of course Slate would try to frame one unfortunate incident as the death knell of a state that’s knocking it out if the park right now. Meanwhile, thousands of extra nursing home deaths in NY don’t get a similar article. It’s like they’re not even trying to hide it anymore.

It seems especially clear in this case that the title is clickbait written long after the interview, which is kind of interesting, was written up. We should fix the title on HN.

I quote from the article:

«I can’t overstate how big this wrench that this is throwing into our local and regional and state economy, actually. Condos and the development of condos and the mortgage brokers that help get the financing, the insurers that insure, the realtors who sell, the investors who buy and flip—if Florida has one main driver of industry, this is it. That is what we do.»

«And I mentioned earlier that condo building is our state’s industry. I literally mean that. The state of Florida was basically considered a wasteland until developers figured out that they could sell the dream of Florida. I’m not exaggerating on this. Our economy over history has basically been a pyramid scheme of developers and people marketing the dream of Florida, to come down to Florida, it’s so beautiful, it’s so carefree. Well, now we have something to care about.»

Those are strong words. The headline doesn't seem overstated or a misrepresentation of those opinions.

"this affects our shell game"

Several buildings collapsed in NY in 2019-20 but there was no super-surge of reporting. Partisan media is quite extraordinary to watch.

I doubt there would be a super surge of reporting for this collapse either if we weren’t looking at a 100 person death count.

I hadn’t heard of any New York buildings collapsing so I googled and found one building under construction that collapsed. There was at least one causality, but a much less compelling story overall.

I don’t find myself agreeing with your take that this is partisan media at play. This will likely turn out to be deadliest building collapse America has seen.

Surely that would be the World Trade Center?

You mean, where passenger jets were used as missiles?

It doesn’t seem remotely relevant to what happened in Florida.

Structural collapses have a wide variety of causes. Wind, fire, earthquakes, snow, flood, design errors, poor workmanship, poor maintainance, corrosion, water damage, pest damage, overloading, fatigue, accidental collision, and yes, terrorism. Most of them aren't directly relevant to each other in terms of lessons learned. But if for some reason you want to rank all "building collapses" by lives lost, I don't know why you would exclude the World Trade Center. It was a building (actually a complex of buildings) and it collapsed. I'm not sure what else you would call it.

So if somebody posts an article about a company with a crappy record in maritime safety, I can bring up Pearl Harbor as relevant?

Depends. Do they call it the "greatest maritime disaster in history" or somesuch? If so, then yes Pearl Harbor would absolutely be fair game to bring into the conversation. In that scenario, they're the one being hyperbolic, not you.

The article’s context is about time-related deterioration, lack of transparency, and how on-top and empowered boards and local civil authorities are to handle critical issues that were both known and could have been prevented.

So I still fail to see the relevance of the WTC collapse, other than both being catastrophic.

I wasn't responding directly to the article, I was responding to the person who commented "This will likely turn out to be deadliest building collapse America has seen." They were making the point about just how catastrophic (and therefore worth of press coverage) the collapse was by by comparing it, in terms of lives lost, with other structural collapses.

Obviously the WTC has nothing to do with the problem of concrete deterioration, but neither did any of the other big collapses that Surfside is likely to surpass (Pemberton Mill, Knickerbocker Theater, Hyatt Regency, etc). They all had very different causes and different lessons to teach.

Why would you assume the poster meant everything above and beyond deterioration related collapse?

I understood “deadliest building collapse America has ever seen” to be context-specific, and I suspect others interpreted it this way as well.

[spontaneous]

What buildings?

> Several buildings collapsed in NY in 2019-20 but there was no super-surge of reporting.

The contention in the article is that Florida's economy is something of a real-estate marketing not-quite-Ponzi scheme centered around selling condos with a carefree lifestyle image, and that this directly impacts that.

While New York real estate is a big deal, I don’t think anyone had any serious argument that those that collapsed (which, unless I’m missing something, were partial collapses of smaller buildings affecting far fewer people than this one collapse, in total) were adversely linked to the core engine of the state or city economy.

> Partisan media is quite extraordinary to watch.

So are partisan efforts to paint unequal treatment of unlike things as partisan.

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