“Three is more than enough,” one owner said. At our annual owners’ meeting in October, my proposal to expand the board was roundly rejected. This summer, I suggested exploring an electric vehicle charging station for our garage and received. When I first became a condo owner four years ago, I quickly discovered that without independent oversight, a governing process that seems like democracy can congeal into something more authoritarian - a seniority system that leaves dissenting voices ignored. If owners aren’t satisfied with board leadership, he says, they can vote them out: “It sort of is the democratic process.” “Do they have to be? No.” Yet Gaines prefers leaving it up to individual condominiums to govern themselves. “Should the board be transparent and be open for ideas and discussion? Yes,” he says. In Massachusetts law and, he estimates, almost 95 percent of condo documents, there’s no requirement for boards to conduct open meetings or even keep minutes. Gaines frequently hears complaints about a lack of transparency among boards. “If a board isn’t raising the homeowner assessments every year,” he told NPR, “that’s a tip-off that something is wrong.” Matthew Gaines, a lawyer who co-chairs the Community Associations Institute, Massachusetts Legislative Action Committee, believes the accounts of many condos here are underfunded: “God forbid they did have some catastrophe, they wouldn’t be able to afford it unless they did a special assessment,” he says. As CEO of Association Reserves, which provides condo associations with financial planning for renovation, replacement, and repairs, Robert Nordlund helps condos budget for major long-term projects.
For example, condos here must have a reserve account to cover unanticipated expenses, but there’s no requirement for how much has to be in it. That changed in 2018 when Florida enacted term limits for board members, a progressive measure Massachusetts has yet to adopt.Ĭompared with other New England states, Massachusetts has relatively few regulations. Instead, he adds, they often do more superficial inspections that won’t result in higher premiums and “sticker shock.”īoard members sometimes artificially suppressed association fees and avoided tough measures “to remain popular and get reelected,” he says. If underwriters “did real, detailed inspections of structural issues, they’d find all kinds of things, but they’re not doing that,” Pizzo says. For example, as stakeholders, insurance agents want to be sure policies are renewed every year. Pizzo, whose family is in the development business, got pushback on his legislation from lawyers, lobbyists, brokers, and boards - all of which had a vested interest in the status quo. “It really is about transparency,” he explains, “and traditionally, associations and condo boards have been created with such kid gloves because they’re voluntary in nature.” As volunteers and not professionals, he says, board members have “really gotten away with a lot.”
From 2017 through (September) 2021, the median sales price for condos in Massachusetts went from $341,000 to $460,000, an increase of almost 35 percent, according to Mike Breed, marketing and communications manager at The Warren Group.įor the past three years, Florida state Senator Jason Pizzo, whose Miami district includes Surfside, has introduced the same bill seeking to hold boards, associations, and management companies more accountable for providing the financial, billing, and engineering records his constituents have been trying unsuccessfully to access. Greater Boston just experienced the most active May on record for condominium sales, up 123 percent from May 2020. Yet it isn’t just condo owners who pay the costs for disasters like Surfside - we all do through the emergency services our towns provide, one more reason why safety is in all of our interest. It was hard not to take the tragedy to heart.
But as one of almost 74 million American homeowners who live in condos, co-ops, and homeowner associations, my second thought was of the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, in June. When I first saw a “Make America Florida” bumper sticker promoting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for president, I thought of the record floods and temperatures across the country this summer and envisioned beachfront property extending into the Midwest.