Reaganomics and the building industry

That collapsed condo is a legacy

While the death toll rises from last week’s devastating Florida condo collapse, a 2018 engineering report warned that Champlain Towers South had serious issues, including seawater in the garage, and “significant” cracks and breaks in the structure’s concrete.

Florida officials said the report, which called for repairs “in the near future,” was probably not even read. Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told NPR:

"I'm under the impression that it is something that nobody had seen until yesterday when we started looking back into the records to try to understand if there was anything in the record that would indicate why this building fell down," he said.

We already knew the building had been sinking for years. We also know that the Miami building boom of the 1980s gave us some deeply shoddy construction, and we are reminded of that with each passing hurricane.

And why would that be? We may have a partial answer.

The seaside condominium went up in the early ‘80s during a time when the city was rebuilding itself. Part of then-Pres. Ronald Reagan’s so-called Reaganomics involved deregulating industry. The idea was to lower the price of doing business, because meeting certain standards (building standards, any standards) costs money.

That savings was meant to be invested back into businesses and thus benefit the American worker— which didn’t happen. What happened, instead, was a few people got richer, and buildings that had no business being built were left to stand as ticking time bombs on the beach, leaving residents and others to wonder as the dust has settled and the life-find and cadaver-seeking dogs do their work: Do we stay? Or do we go?

Here’s the report no one read.