Monthly fees, the financial lifeblood of condo developments, have risen sharply as boards try to generate cash for long-deferred maintenance and to cover basic expenses. As a result, more owners can’t make their payments, and fewer prospective owners can afford to buy in.
At the same time, tightened lending rules, and a reluctance among banks to foreclose on units that will be hard to resell, have boosted the number of long-vacant condos in many complexes, further depleting the flow of fees that pay for utilities, trash collection, upkeep and repairs.
“These communities are suffering desperately,” said Vicki Vergagni, community manager at Glen Waye Gardens in Silver Spring. “This is potentially a great type of housing that is affordable. But public policy has not foreseen the issues it’s created.”"
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This is from late last year, but it is worth reading.
4 comments:
"Community manager"? This alone is part of the problem - conflating the "community" with the condominium corporation or the physical structure. What's completely missing from the article is the role that the trade groups of managers and condo attorneys have had in siphoning off money from the condo corporation and its involuntary members. What's their solution? Why uncapped assessment increases and ongoing federal financial support. After all they want to keep the gravy train to help unsophisticated buyers open their wallets and 100% of the equity in the property to pour into the feeding trough that these vendors feed out of. Condominiums are not viable housing for anyone except maybe those in the top 5% of the nation financially. They are the only ones that have the resources to deal with the problems that condominiums ubiquitously have. Condominiums are NOT a viable "affordable housing" solution.
IC_deLight said… “’Community manager’? This alone is part of the problem”
“Community manager” is such an Orwellian term.
Most of us go to work every day, where we are paid by some corporation to be managed and told what to do while on the job.
At the end of the day, the owners of H.O.A.-burdened housing get to pay another corporation for the privilege of being managed and told what to do at home.
It is utter insanity, yet we Americans have been conditioned to accept this as normal.
Evan McKenzie said... "The condominium...it's kind of almost a fictional real estate interest. These things can only exist by statute...Condominiums can only exist where statutes authorize them to exist. So we've had them since about 1960." (Urban Institute, 06/30/2011)
Evan McKenzie wrote… “the real estate industry, bankers, or title companies…love condominium ownership because it creates many individual units that can be bought and sold, creating a whole lot of business for everybody involved in real estate transactions” (re housing co-ops, 03/26/2016)
IC_deLight said… “Condominiums are not viable housing for anyone except maybe those in the top 5% of the nation financially. They are the only ones that have the resources to deal with the problems that condominiums ubiquitously have. Condominiums are NOT a viable "affordable housing" solution.”
As usual, this is worth repeating :
”Before 1960, the condominium form of ownership was unknown in the United States. Beginning in the early 1960s, the states began enacting statues authorizing the condominium form of ownership, principally in response to the enactment of the National Housing Act of 1961, which extended Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance to the condominium form of ownership. See McKenzie, supra note 2, at 95. By 1967, all fifty states had enacted condominium statutes. Id. at 95–96.” (Steven Siegel. "The Public Role in Establishing Private Residential Communities." Urban Lawyer. Fall 2006. Footnote 23 on page 869. PDF and TOC)
1967 was fifty years ago.
IC_deLight said… “’Community manager’? This alone is part of the problem - conflating the "community" with the condominium corporation or the physical structure.”
To paraphrase Theodore Dalrymple:
“In my study of communisty associations, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communisty propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A community of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
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