Miami orders evacuation of 156-unit as structurally and electrically unsafe

In this case it's hard to say someone else was to blame, because the principals had mostly not delegated the decision, they were literally deciding with their own lives at stake. If it were some principal agent problem you'd find a common excuse: it's the agents fault, they chose in their own interest and not the principals.

And yet somehow they didn't decide to repair the building. So yes, even though we had a bunch of free adults with years to make the decision and the lowest interest rates ever, they didn't fix a thing that represents a catastrophic risk to themselves.

No doubt someone will dig deeper into this and find some way the market was impeded, ideological wars being what they are, but it's hard to see how that would explain away the casual observation that people had the agency to avoid getting killed here.

Note that I'm not arguing for more government control over these things, that tends to create an agency problem. Just puzzled over how it could get to this, and a bit questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.

In this case the negative event was a black swan event. The board and residents were required to correctly understand the risk of failure to remediate problems in this specific building. Who does an in-depth analysis of risk of building failure when renting or buying a property? Not a single person correctly identified that a collapse was imminent.

The other problem with rare events is that you can ignore them most of the time and not suffer any consequences. If there is a one in a thousand chance of something bad happening, and addressing that risk will cost you your job, or money, or your reputation then 99.9% of the time you incur that cost unnecessarily. That means that an entity that addresses risk becomes less competitive than a (lucky) company who doesn't.

If you increase the market size, then a lot of these complaints go away. Assessing risk of collapse across a hundred thousand buildings, like an insurance company might do, is much easier. If buildings were maintained by corporations that controlled many properties, people could avoid companies with poor track records.

We've needed new roofs for years. We got bids, but by the time that the HOA could meet, the bids already were too old. We voted to charge everyone based off the cost of the bids + 10%. We had owners that didn't pay or owners that paid too late. Our bids expired again and then we had some safety issues that we had to handle. So now we didn't have enough money for the roofs again, but likewise people wanted other stuff done.

It took nearly 5 years for us to finally get new roofs. Covid happened and prices went up again, but thankfully we had enough to cover stuff. Actually, only some of the roofs are currently done. 6 buildings: 3 done/3 not. <50 units total. I cannot imagine how much more complicated it would be with a bunch of units.

I would not want to live in a building like that. I am quite satisfied with our one-story 1500 square foot house.

Build new housing development

Sell all properties on it with 99 year leases

When 50 years to go on lease conduct on block sale (maybe developer pays)

Demolish and rebuild and restart 99 year lease cycle

This keeps construction industry active on scarce land resource

Keeps buildings fresh with latest materials and engineering principles

Gives property owners an exit on their 99 year lease so household wealth doesn't evaporate

Strategy folds when Singapore is no longer a desirable place to invest/build

Although the prevalence of old housing across the UK suggests (to me at least) that something systematic has changed. The fact that people can have an obsession with tudor, georgian, Victorian style housing tells me that things were built to last in a way that might be less true today.

As you say, the technology to build so high is a recent one, I note the Empire State Building is only 80 years old which is pretty young when compared against Notre Dame for example

The homeowners are out of luck until a claim is made on the master insurance policy.

This shouldn't actually be a problem because that's what the master policy is for but it sounds like something has gone wrong with making a claim.