On November 13, 2024, two members of a three-person board approved a $21 million special assessment for 1060 Brickell, a 605-unit condominium in Miami. The residents were on a virtual call. They were muted.
Board president Jacob Kassell and one other director voted to levy roughly $40,000 to $50,000 per unit for façade work, roofing, pool deck repairs, and other items identified in the building's structural-integrity reserve study. Twenty-five percent was due in January. The association's attorney told CBS Miami the board had a legal duty to maintain and repair the property, and that refusing to act could endanger the building and its residents. An owner named Nima Mahdjour said the process was rushed and lacked transparency.
What the owners did about it was hold an election. Kassell tried to eliminate electronic voting and postpone the scheduled board vote. The election happened anyway, observed by two state regulatory volunteers through a five-hour count. Dorinda Spahr received 192 votes. Kassell received none. A new board majority took control, and a recall proceeding followed. As of 2026, Spahr is listed as association president in Florida's corporate records.
The $21 million in needed work did not disappear with the old board.
I spent five years on cargo ships, and one thing you learn at sea is that maintenance doesn't care about your feelings. Rust doesn't negotiate. Salt water doesn't wait for the crew to agree on a budget. The difference between a cargo ship and a condominium building is that the ship has a captain with actual authority, a maintenance schedule the Coast Guard enforces, and a crew that gets paid. A condominium has volunteers.
How many buildings, how many volunteers
The Foundation for Community Association Research estimates roughly 373,000 community associations in the United States, covering 78 million residents. About 2.56 million people serve as elected board members or appointed committee members, putting in an estimated 102.6 million volunteer hours a year. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of these associations are self-managed. No professional management company, just the volunteers and whatever filing system they inherited from the last volunteers.
In Florida, condominium directors serve without compensation. They must complete a four-hour state-approved course within 90 days of taking office, covering milestone inspections, reserve studies, elections, recordkeeping, and financial literacy. They have a fiduciary relationship to unit owners. A willful failure to obtain a required milestone inspection constitutes a breach of that fiduciary duty under state law.
Four hours, and then you are responsible for structural engineering decisions, insurance procurement, reserve fund management, and compliance with federal lending standards on a building where the ocean is three blocks away.
A 2026 industry survey of 587 respondents, voluntary and not nationally representative, found that 59 percent of the most recent board elections were uncontested. Fifty-six percent of associations reported too few candidates. The top reasons people gave for leaving boards were time demands (44 percent), personal attacks (29 percent), and conflict among homeowners (25 percent). Fear of personal liability came in at 9 percent.
That liability number was taken in February 2026, before Fannie Mae's new rules landed. I'd be curious what it reads now.
What changed in August
On August 3, 2026, Fannie Mae's updated condo project requirements took effect. A companion piece in this issue walks through the rule mechanics, so I'll keep this short. For loan applications dated August 3 or later, Fannie retired the abbreviated paperwork track it used to allow for established condo buildings. Lenders now generally need the full version, which means substantially more documentation from associations about insurance, reserves, repairs, and delinquencies. A further increase in the required reserve contribution takes effect in January 2027.
What that means for a given building: if the association can't produce the documents, or if its numbers fall short of Fannie's thresholds, conventional mortgage financing for units there can be blocked. The building doesn't have to be unsafe. The board just has to have failed to generate the right paperwork, fund reserves at the right level, or resolve the right disputes on the right timeline.
At Casa Costa, a 17-year-old condominium in Boynton Beach, the association was already undertaking $7 million in façade work when it turned up on Fannie Mae's ineligible-project list. The trigger, according to the Wall Street Journal, was a questionnaire answer suggesting part of the property operated as a hotel. Association president Jake Harrington called it "a blacklist for a typo." Sales fell through.
In "Five Numbers for One House," I followed a set of institutions assigning incompatible values to the same coastal Florida home. The insurer, the lender, the tax assessor, the market, and the owner were already measuring different realities. Fannie Mae's project review adds the association's finances and governance to that stack, which means the board's filing cabinet can now be the measurement that determines whether a sale closes.
Fannie Mae says stronger reviews support financially healthy associations and sustainable homeownership. Dawn Bauman of the Community Associations Institute disputes the premise, saying she hasn't seen evidence that the old abbreviated review produced materially worse loan performance. The National Association of Mortgage Brokers asked federal regulators for a middle path, arguing the change falls hardest on first-time buyers and on smaller, self-managed associations with no professional recordkeeping.
Whoever is right, the disagreement lands in the same laps. The federal standard tightened, the documentation burden went up, and the people who have to produce the documents are the people who ran unopposed.
What the rooms look like
I've been reading board minutes, local news coverage, court filings, and owner accounts from climate-exposed buildings up and down the coast. Each building's crisis has its own shape. The governance dynamics repeat.
The revolt that killed its own financing. At Summit Towers in Hollywood Beach, owners challenged a proposed $56 million assessment, roughly $1,000 to $1,500 per month per unit. Several long-term owners said they lived on fixed incomes and couldn't absorb it. The prior board said it was following professional advice and that the repairs were necessary. State Senator Jason Pizzo warned that some boards were bundling legally required structural work with discretionary improvements, making it hard for owners to tell which was which.
Owners retained counsel, threatened litigation, and elected replacement directors. New president Bill Knickerbocker told NBC6 what happened next: the bank financing the assessment required the association to have no pending or threatened litigation. The owner challenge counted as a threat. The bank withdrew.
"That killed the assessment."
The replacement board acknowledged that a smaller assessment would still be needed before the property's 50-year recertification. The repair obligation survived the revolt. The tool the owners used to stop one board's plan, though, was the same tool that removed the financing for any plan.
I've seen versions of this in other rooms. A union local votes down a contract because the terms are bad, and then finds out the company wasn't bluffing about the plant. The workers were right about the contract. They were also out of a job.
The resignation. At the Villas of Carillon, 165 townhouses near St. Petersburg, owners received a proposal in June 2024 that could have required roughly $60,000 per household for balcony and waterproofing work, garage roofing, painting, drainage, and tile roofs. Association documents showed owners had voted for about 20 years to waive fully funded reserves.
Twenty years is a long time to keep voting yourself out of a savings account. But I've known people who did the same thing with their own retirement, and the reason was always the same: the money wasn't there. You can't save what you don't have, and telling people they should have saved more is advice that always seems to come from someone who started with more.
Residents asked whether cheaper alternatives had been considered. More than 110 of 165 households signed a petition. Owners packed a hotel meeting, and the vote was tabled. The next day, the entire board resigned.
I don't know why each director left. The reporting doesn't include individual resignation letters. Maybe liability fear, maybe exhaustion, maybe fury at the owners who'd just rejected months of work. What I know is that a volunteer governing body, facing a repair bill it couldn't fund without a revolt, stopped existing. The repairs stayed necessary. The insurance problem the board had cited didn't resolve itself. The building simply had nobody authorized to act.
At Grenadier Lakes at Welleby in Sunrise, a similar collapse left residents locked out of association funds with an insurance payment of more than $20,000 coming due. They raised the money themselves, passing the hat for their own building's coverage because the governance structure had evaporated.
The developer's vote. Brickell Key is a private island in Miami with 13 condominium buildings and a master association responsible for island-wide infrastructure, including an aging seawall. The master association approved a $32 million assessment for seawall replacement, based on engineering recommendations.
Here the question is who gets to vote at all. Swire Properties, the developer, retains a controlling vote under the governing documents until its last available unit is sold, which resident and board member Frank Lago estimated could take about five years. In May 2026, five condominium associations filed suit, alleging that Swire-appointed representatives control all three master-board seats and that unit owners are being assessed for property largely owned by Swire, its affiliates, or the city.
Those are allegations in a pending complaint. The structural question doesn't require a verdict, though: who holds the vote in a place where the sea is rising? At Brickell Key, the answer is a developer whose interests may or may not line up with the residents paying the assessment. In most associations, the answer is whichever neighbors showed up.
The timing trap. At 2434 St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, a 19-unit condominium damaged during Hurricane Ida, the board faced a sequencing problem. The insurer denied coverage for exterior windows in October 2022. Arbitration wasn't scheduled until October 2024. Total repairs were estimated at $1.6 million.
The board decided not to wait. It spent the association's $500,000 reserve, levied a $1.1 million special assessment, and contracted for window and stucco work. Owners Pamela and Eric Person, assigned $45,980, sued. Their argument was that the board should have waited for the insurance result before fixing owners' final liability.
A Louisiana appellate court agreed, at least procedurally, affirming an injunction against enforcing the assessment while insurance proceeds remained unknown. The court didn't say the repairs weren't needed. It said the board moved too fast to know how much owners actually owed.
In "The Adaptation Float," I wrote about the cost carried between an official award and usable protection, the stretch where households advance time, cash, and uncertainty while an institution processes a claim. The 2434 St. Charles board tried to close that gap by acting before the insurance question was answered. A court told them they couldn't. The building sat in the gap, with the windows the way they were.
The argument that has no winner
Attorney Luis Konski, in Associated Press coverage of Florida's reserve mandates, reduced the choice to "save money or save lives." Reserve specialist Robert Nordlund puts it with less drama and in the same direction: the deterioration continues, and deferring contributions doesn't make the eventual bill smaller. Owner Kelli Roiter, in a 1971 Hallandale Beach oceanfront building, supported the mandate after watching problems in her own building go unaddressed for years.
On the other side, Rick Madan of the Biscayne Neighborhoods Association argues that a uniform timetable treats newer and older buildings alike and compounds insurance increases for fixed-income owners. Florida Senator Ed Hooper called portions of the 2022 post-Surfside law an overreaction. The 2025 legislation he supported let associations use loans to meet reserve obligations and, under specified conditions, pause reserve contributions during major repair projects.
Both sides are describing consequences that actually happen. Deferred maintenance killed 98 people at Champlain Towers South. Rigid assessment schedules can push fixed-income owners out of homes they've lived in for thirty years. I've watched this same argument in other industries, where a safety regulation is obviously necessary and obviously ruinous to the people least able to absorb it. The shop owner who says the new ventilation system will bankrupt him isn't lying. The workers breathing the dust aren't wrong either. Who pays for the fix is the question nobody wants, and in every version of it I've covered, the answer required money that wasn't in the room.
In a condo board meeting on a Tuesday evening with twelve people present, that question gets a vote, taken by whoever showed up and binding on everyone who didn't.
What the kitchen table looks like
The Cricket Club, a nearly 50-year-old, 220-unit building on Biscayne Bay, proposed an assessment of almost $30 million, more than $134,000 per unit, for roof and façade work. Board president Alexandros Washburn argued that a prior recertification didn't mean the building's current condition was acceptable, and that postponed repairs would only cost more. Owner Maria Tkachun, who'd bought her unit for $490,000 and spent $100,000 renovating it, told the Wall Street Journal that banks were already requiring buyers in the building to put 25 percent down because the association lacked reserves. Another owner, Ivan Rodriguez, reported selling at a substantial loss.
Tkachun and other owners assembled and compared the project records themselves. That detail is worth sitting with. The owners had to reconstruct, out of scattered documents, the information they needed to judge a decision that would determine whether their homes were worth anything. The board had the engineering report. The owners had each other's kitchen tables.
I've covered enough labor disputes and industrial accidents to know that arrangement. The people most affected by a decision are the last ones to see the paperwork that produced it. Management has the safety report; the workers have the injuries. It doesn't get built that way by accident, or by the people standing on the floor.
102.6 million hours
The industry figure says 102.6 million volunteer hours go into governing these associations every year. Nobody counts the hours owners spend in hotel ballrooms with petitions, at kitchen tables comparing documents, or on the phone with a lawyer trying to work out what their board just did to the value of their home. Call it volunteering if you like. It's work, it's unpaid, and the people doing it didn't train for the job they're performing. We just finished a long weekend named for the proposition that labor ought to be recognized; here's a category of it that doesn't even have a name.
The federal government sets lending standards. The state mandates inspections and reserves. The insurance market prices risk. The engineering firm produces a report. All of it arrives at a volunteer board that meets monthly, may struggle to reach quorum, and whose members took a four-hour course before assuming fiduciary duties that now cover structural engineering, insurance markets, mortgage finance, and climate adaptation.
These decisions keep getting harder because the physical risks keep getting worse. The governance system absorbing all of it was designed for pool maintenance schedules and parking disputes.
The buildings need the work, the money has to come from somewhere, and the decisions have to be made by someone. Right now that someone is the person who ran unopposed, and the room full of neighbors who will live with whatever gets decided, whether they showed up to vote or not.
- Post-August loan outcomes: No named condo unit whose mortgage transaction was documented as denied or rerouted under Fannie Mae's August 3 Full Review requirement had surfaced by September 10, but mortgage professionals predicted 60- to 90-day processing times and redirections to higher-rate portfolio loans.
- Florida's building-code payoff: A peer-reviewed study of more than 500,000 Florida homes found that those built under the newer statewide code were 22 percent less likely to suffer wind damage after Hurricane Irma, with 27 percent lower loss severity when damage did occur — one measure of what adequate construction standards are worth when the storm arrives.
- Champlain Towers board resignations: Five of seven Champlain Towers South board members resigned in 2019 amid disagreement over the pace and cost of repairs identified in a 2018 engineering report, two years before the building's collapse — the clearest historical case of a major repair obligation destabilizing volunteer governance before catastrophe.
- January 2027 reserve threshold: Fannie Mae's next scheduled change raises the minimum replacement-reserve contribution from 10 to 15 percent of an association's annual budget for Full Review applications dated January 4, 2027 or later, which will test whether boards that barely met the August standard can close the gap in five months.