Florida beach condominiums need serious work. One condominium building collapsed and suddenly people [insurance companies] are paying attention to a problem that has been “building” for decades. The Florida building boom really took off after WW2, and for a long time there has been inadequate oversight of building on land that is itself artificial. That’s because “a lot of inspection practices in the boom years were ‘a fiasco, a joke’ and not ‘worth a damn.” And owners have been reluctant to address structural issues because of the costs involved.

“I use the green banana metaphor,” says Bill Sklar, a lawyer and law professor who has been working on condo issues in Florida since 1980. “An older person goes to the supermarket and sees some green bananas. But she buys the yellow ones, because she’s not sure she’s going to be around long enough to see the green bananas ripen. Now apply that to a condo resident,” he went on. “Well, if you’ve $1,500 in the bank, you take your grandkids on a vacation to Disney World. Or you take them on a cruise.” And you vote no on authorizing the repairs.

—New York Times, 31 January 2022

Gary’s initial reasoning for not wanting to vote in favor of the repipe was exactly like this. “We’ll die before the plumbing issues get to us.” I overrode him. He was voting yellow banana. I’m a futurist. And our building is a steel structure with concrete. I recently learned a vulnerable aspect of our building is the fancy period facings on the east and south facades [we’re on the east] which might fall off in the event of a catastrophic earthquake. We’re already used to worrying about earthquakes.

And then there is the galvanized pipe in our building. Vulnerable. Life expectancy of 50 years. Construction broke ground a hundred years ago. Imagine. Repipe will cost almost a third of the insured cost of a rebuild, ground up? Voted in favor anyway.

Galvanized steel is often labeled “rust resistant” and that term is a joke to us living on oceanfront. (Stainless steel is rust resistant, but will corrode only slightly and very, very slowly. Rust resistant metal in the salt air? Maybe three days before it begins to corrode. More likely, 24 hours.) There are samples of galvanized pipe retrieved from our building, riddled with corrosion inside out. It’s plenty bad. The costs are plenty terrible too, but the alternative really does not bear thinking about. We’re not talking about bananas. We are talking about the integrity of a building on the National Register.

I love architecture. It was my original life goal when I was a little girl to become an architect. When I understood at age nine that I would never visit Arabia and see the horses (I was nine), I turned my attention to buildings. Knossos. Acropolis. Hagia Sophia. Sagrada Família. Sixty years later, I accept in my 70th year that I am unlikely to ever see those structures.

But it’s not too late to save the building I live in half the week. [And Gary really hopes he’ll get a hot shower out of the deal.]

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I was supposed to debrief an exercise today, but I got sidetracked. New exercise coming Friday.