Shoddy Housing Poses New Woes for Floridians

As Floridians debate how home construction figured in Hurricane Andrew’s devastation, a key question has become whether a state with an unlimited appetite for low-cost housing has the political will to change building practices.

Since the nation’s costliest natural disaster hit on Aug. 24, evidence has accumulated that the destruction was exacerbated by sloppy workmanship, poor building design and neglectful or even corrupt building inspectors. Amid howls over shoddy work that seems to have been nearly everywhere in South Florida, some steps to tighten codes and enforcement are clearly ahead.

“When it is a question of the safety of our families, no effort, no price, is too high,” said Dade County Commissioner Harvey Rubin.

Yet some officials and others worry that it may be too much to hope that the state can reverse a half-century’s history in building practices as it simultaneously tightens government’s enforcement activities.

“Right now, it’s treason to say we’re not going to do anything that it takes,” said one county official, who asked not to be named. “But when the commotion dies down, the economics of this are going to be clearer.” The community would make a political judgment, the official said, on how much it wanted to spend to protect against extreme storms.

At the same time, Florida faces great risks if it does not take dramatic steps.

Some hurricane experts say Florida has been lucky in recent decades, but, because of climate changes, that storms like Andrew will become more frequent. And, though the hurricane will temporarily slow growth in south Dade County, a state that has grown sixfold since the 1950s is likely to have many more people in low-cost homes in the years ahead.

The list of construction horror stories grows daily. In expanses of mutilated housing that run to the horizon, there is final proof that the South Florida Building Code, much praised for its high standards, did not protect homeowners when it counted.

Often, trusses were not adequately secured to the beams beneath them with the metal bands called hurricane straps. Often, windows were poorly installed, and roofing that should have been nailed was stapled.

Builders sometimes used plywood that was too thin, or substituted weaker particle board instead. Frequently, nails or staples were driven incorrectly, and didn’t fasten plywood sheets to the trusses at all.

Sloppily built homes hurt more than their owners.

More than 50 yards from Jack Cook’s house in suburban Homestead is a house roofed with handsome Spanish-style barrel tiles. When Andrew began to blow, they flew like shrapnel, pocking Cook’s car, and also inflicting damage much farther away.

“The tiles were spraying around out here like machine gun fire,” Cook said. In many homes, such tiling came loose because the pieces were fixed with dabs, rather than continuous strips, of mortar. Clearly, some of these practices were the result of sloppy inspection of the work of builders whose foremost goal was to finish the job as quickly and cheaply as possible.

County officials have vowed to go after guilty builders, and the county inspectors who failed to police them. Lawsuits have been filed against the developer of one recently built housing tract near Cutler Ridge.

But as the posses organize, some worry that it will be hard to keep construction to code. With 60 inspectors, the building and zoning force has been stretched thin for years.

Now, at a time when the county treasury faces growing demands, the inspector team will be asked to police a pell-mell rebuilding of the south county. And local officials have already been publicly fretting that the construction work force includes many with inadequate training, and others who are outright crooks.

In addition, there are longstanding allegations of corruption in the building inspection force. Two years ago, a grand jury cited evidence that inspectors weren’t adequately policing contractors; in 1987, a building inspector and 24 developers, contractors and homeowners were indicted in a payoff investigation.

Many officials believe a code crackdown will be sufficient. Elaine Gordon, a state legislator from Miami Beach, expects the wrongdoers will be brought to light through official investigations, lawsuits and the appraisals of the insurance companies.

“The real problem is the enforcement of the code,” she said. “I don’t really believe this is going to cause a stricter code to be adopted.”

Gordon and many others assert that the hurricane’s damage occurred because the 160-m.p.h. winds were outside the range of the code’s standard.

But a team of scientists from the Wind Engineering Research Council said that in fact the wind speeds close to the ground’s surface topped out at 110 to 125 miles per hour. If they are right, buildings that met codes should have been protected.

And, although the code has many defenders, it has not escaped notice that most of the homes standing through vast stretches of south Dade are ones built in the mid-1950s and earlier, to standards much higher than those now prescribed.

Squat, with low roofs, these dwellings have enormous strength from their inner and outer concrete walls, inch-thick tongue-and-grove ceiling decking, and gable-end walls made of masonry, rather than wood. These are the homes that dominated the old Florida.

To the eye of the modern home buyer--or at least the modern developer--they’re ugly ducklings. They cost more to build and require more skill in construction workers.

But their design makes them tolerant of flaws in construction. Houses built after the code was adopted in 1957 tend to be designed exactly to the code specifications, but no higher. When the builders have slipped up in construction--as they apparently often have--the structures have become dangerously vulnerable.

The vulnerability of the least expensive housing, mobile homes, is even greater.

They account for nearly half of the dwellings in the state, said Rubin, the county commissioner. Trailer parks with names like Four Seasons and Pine Isle were obliterated in the storm; their units were often thrown great distances, destroying other buildings.

Since the hurricane, officials of Homestead and some other communities have gingerly broached the topic of phasing out mobile homes. “We have an opportunity to rebuild ourselves as a model city,” said Alex Muxo, the Homestead city manager.

But the task may turn out to be difficult. With many residents’ homes destroyed, the demand for the cheapest of housing is likely to grow. Mobile home distributors are predicting a boom.

And while communities can put zoning restrictions on mobile homes, state and federal laws prohibit communities from restricting them so severely as to unfairly discriminate against lower income residents, officials say.

After Hurricane Hugo struck Charleston, S. C., in 1989, officials considered outlawing mobile homes but rejected the idea after reviewing the laws, Commissioner Rubin said.

And the state’s home building industry has proved formidable in blocking a tightening of standards in the past. Seven years ago, the state Legislature passed a law requiring that coastal buildings hold up under 140-m.p.h. winds. After a counteroffensive led by builders, the standard was cut back to 110 m.p.h.

“We can design homes to withstand any hurricane,” said Jack Haslam, of the Florida Homebuilders Assn. “But you’ve got to weigh the economic consequences. And there are a lot of people who don’t have a lot to spend on housing.”