Harbor Towers saga

My guess is that the residents of these condos have been paying thousands per year for condo fees. A concrete tower doesn't really have much with respect to maintenance, so I would think the owners should have been able to put away lots of those condo fees aside for an expense like this. I hope nobody walked away or skimmed from this fund. Who knows, maybe they had a very low condo fee. Again, concrete towers don't need much maintenance so the money should have been set aside to cover the majority of this expense. Lastly, I would make sure that the building owners had kept up with the routine maintenance of the old HVAC and put this expense on their radar with some sort of capital plan as part of their maintenance plan.

As Kimberly states, the special assessment (i.e. one-time out of pocket expenses not part of monthly HOA fees) ranged from $70K - $400K per unit.

Some examples of current Harbor Towers list prices and corresponding monthly HOA fees are as follows:

Unit 2E
Listed at $395,000
864 square feet
HOA fee: $528

Unit 28G
Listed at $680,000
1212 square feet
HOA fee: $874

Unit 12EF
Listed at $2,750,000
2511 square feet
HOA fee: $1,828

There are currently 21 units available at the Harbor Towers development.

Some of the people who have not paid, have no ability to pay. The building admitted mixed-income tenants and now is asking them to come up with 1/4 to 1/5 the value of their units in cash...

Lack of planning on your part does not make it an emergency for me.

Pay up!

It's easy to point fingers in shock at Harbor Towers.

But this story shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who lives in a condo. In fact, it's a nightmare every condo association will have to face--though they hope it's later, rather than sooner.

The reason why is simple. The bigger the building, the larger the capital expenses each resident will have to pay. It's not proportional, and it doesn't come out in the wash--the more people who share your space, the more each of you will have to pay to maintain it.

That's the opposite of what most people think. A condo is supposed to be low maintenance. Low cost, too.

But in reality, there are very few things that can happen to a house--barring total disaster, of course--that a middle-class familiy can't somehow find a way to pay.

When it comes to a building, though, all bets are off. Badly sagging floors in a house can sometimes be fixed with a Home Depot lally column in the basement. In a four-story brick building, the same problem can involve structural engineers, steel supports, major foundation repair, and worse.

Same with systems, too. There is really only so much plumbing in one single-family house. But in a large building, there may be miles of old lines snaking up multiple floors--all hitting its sell-by date at the same time.

If you know anything about repair costs, you know it doesn't even take a gigantic building to produce this scary effect. A condo-ized triple decker will do.

None of this would matter if condo associations truly assessed the fees they need to build their reserves and keep the building in shape. But they don't. It's a crapshoot whether you can scoot out of your unit right before the hammer falls, or whether you'll buy in the day before the assessment arrives.

In a state where so many condos are getting old fast, it's just not a pretty picture.