UMass Economist Says ‘Privatized Housing’ to Blame for Florida Building Collapse
“privatized housing violates democracy”
Yes, because public housing is always superior to private housing, right? What an absurd suggestion.
The College Fix reports:
UMass economist blames ‘privatized housing’ for Florida condo collapse
A professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has blamed “privatized housing” for the recent collapse of a Florida condo building, further charging that it “violates democracy.”
The 12-story condo building Champlain Towers South partially collapsed in Surfside, Florida, on the early morning of June 24.
The current death toll, according to several press reports, is at 27, with over 100 more people currently unaccounted for.
An investigation into the cause of the building’s collapse is ongoing.
But Richard Wolff, retired economics professor and author of the books “Understanding Socialism,” “Understanding Marxism,” and “The Sickness in the System,” wrote on Twitter on June 30 that he knows the real culprit.
Miami's collapsed condo shows: privatized housing violates democracy. Only condo owners voted to defer building repair. Delivery workers, condo visitors, repairers knew nothing, didn't vote, risked injury, death. As irreducibly social, housing must be run democratically by all.
— Richard D. Wolff (@profwolff) July 1, 2021
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Comments
Public housing doesn’t have 40 year problems because they need to implode it at 20 years to make room for the next failed project. Baltimore alternates between high-rises and low-rises as the solution every 20 years. Not a coincidence that “Controlled Demolition” is based there.
Oh, and it was “public” building inspectors who looked the other way when shoddy practices were employed. Look at the pics. Deck rebar not physically tied into the column rebar. I think they rushed to drop the other building so there would be no evidence of what really existed prior to the collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEPyE2h6P4k
Look at the rebar above the column with “72” on it at the 14m18s mark. THAT tells the entire story. Just had friction to hold it in place, and the corrosion decreased the friction between steel and concrete to nil. The annual subsidence was a measure of the physical slippage between the two structural components. 2mm/yr x YY years is Z inches of slippage! That column rebar should have been tied into the deck rebar with multi-drectional perpendicular bends, not just pieces laid over one another like a giant game of pick up sticks. Someone from the city was paid off to look the other way as they poured concrete over work that wasn’t done properly. Go look at any building with concrete columns under construction. Those columns will have 90 degree rebar bends going in all 4 directions, which will be wire tied to rebar in the deck, which will itself have vertical rebar bends to form the base of the next column. The big question is how many other buildings were also improperly constructed to save money. I am thinking that the concrete itself may preclude X-ray examination of the steel lattice in an intact structure. There will be a coverup of this because otherwise simply expect a mass evacuation of many buildings down there whose construction is now suspect.
I read most of the reports written after Hurricane Andrew. All that blather about how the building codes failed, they did not fail. In many cases they were simply ignored. “We don’t need no stinkin’ rebar.” Seemed to be a common belief. Either rebar dissolves following inspection or it just plain was not there to begin with. Same goes for gable end tie downs. So I have no doubt code violations were either simply missed or ignored for compensation. But I have a feeling that will be glossed over and another round of code revisions will be demanded.
I am not sure but I think Surfside just missed being built under Florida’s Threshold Building statute.
“As irreducibly social, housing must be run democratically by all”
Translation: Give us Communism and give us death!
I’ll listen to this guy when he lets the entire community vote on where he lives.
And, true to the Marxist ‘playbook’, always use the occurrence of some tragedy to bolster the superiority of Communism by proffering: “If we were living under Marxism, these sort of things wouldn’t happen.”
Love to hear what he had to say about the natural gas line explosions in his nearby suburbs of Boston in 2018. whose fault was the failure of the gas lines, the gas company or the government that is tasked to inspecting the lines. Who was responsible for letting too much pressure get into the lines that caused them to fail and explode. The gas company or the government’s regulatory body?
Privatize housing’s fault, obv! /s
The fool’s a self serving jack-off …
J/o is, by its very nature, self-ssrving.
Say what you like about Cabrini-Green, but it didn’t fall down. You could be poisoned by the mold in the ductwork, shot in the corridors by drug dealers, toasted in apartment fires, or even eaten to death in your sickbed by rats, but it didn’t fall down. No matter how much all their neighbors begged God to make it fall down.
As someone who has served on the Board of Directors of two separate condos, I believe there is a wide-spread lack of education on what a condominium is and how they operate. Perhaps law schools can offer adult education courses on the subject. In general, the Condo Board has a duty to make sufficient investments to protect the property and make sure that it does not deteriorate to the point of collapse. This is the same as the Board of Trustees having a similar duty to make sure the campus does not collapse. The people who run for condo boards are very ill-equipped. They don’t know what “make a motion” means and do not understand a reserve study or engineering report. They have powerful political incentives to vote “no” on every condo fee increase.
The local ordinance requiring a 40 year structural review is an excellent example of law being applied to private property in an appropriate way. Just as building codes are a necessary part of legal regulation for the greater good.
None of this has anything to do with “privitization” or “socialism.”
Prof. Wolff (Moron) sez:
1. There is no positive economic phenomena that could possibly legitimize the free market, and
2. There is no negative economic or financial event that isn’t proof of the failure of the free market, and
3. Nothing works as well as socialism. Who do you trust, me or your lying eyes?
Yup, socialists make great decisions on maintenance. Like Chernobyl.