It shouldn't take horrific accidents for us to suddenly decide to care about structural safety.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/majority-of-fl...
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.
Oh and in a system where health insurance really cared about prevention, they'd pay for everyone's gym memberships.
If it’s free why not sign up, maybe someday I’ll use it. Maybe not
Edit: decrease the amount done as a percentage of signups. Perhaps the growth in signups would make up for the percentage drop in aggregate terms. Ie flood the gym with memberships and only find one more person actually working out
Building codes are written in blood, as they have always been.
All economic systems begin and end with the lament "if only we had more money, we could do it right."
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.
I suggest putting this into context of all the buildings in the US. This is an exceedingly rare event. Perhaps the very fact that buildings are so safe in the US lulled the residents into a false sense of security.
For example, when an earthquake hits a third world city, half the city falls down. When an earthquake hits a US city, the damage is light.
I remember the Nisqually quake here 20 years ago. The ground was rocking and rolling making it risky to walk, poles were swinging, and buildings were swaying. But there was very little damage.
Back in the 80's I was in Tokyo and woke up to an earthquake. I mentioned it at work the next day, and the reaction of the workers there was "so what".
The common factor here is that the warnings were ignored by humans. Creatures that reached the peak of their evolution on the plains of Africa.
Whilst masters of the earth, our cognition just isn’t tuned to dealing with low-probability high-consequence events that may occur on a time scale outside our life spans.
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.
You don't know what you don't know. And disasters happen. After Hurricane Andrew, we learned from studying what broke, and made major improvements to building codes. Same thing will happen here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_building_...
That building was reported under the same safety industry and regulations, and nothing was done. We know intellectually, just as before, what happens to buildings with structural failures: they collapse. The difference is that we quickly forget the emotional or cultural awareness of the problem, and only care about these issues for as long as that news cycle lasts.
I'd say we could trade away the feeling that we could spend the money elsewhere for the lives of all the people who were killed.
I'd like to pay lower taxes, and have them spent on different things. Such as reliable infrastructure instead of 20-year wars. (And a pony.)
I can't believe we don't have any successful politicians who campaign on the promise of higher taxes and an end to all credits, deductions, and exclusions for everyone. It feels like it isn't sellable at all.