Vancouver, B.C.: `A World-Class Disaster'

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Nona Saunders was about to take a visitor on a whirlwind, crosstown tour of leaky condominiums in this, the North American capital of leaky condos.

She didn't even need to start her car.

"You see that building right here?" said Saunders, head of the Condominium Home Owners Association of B.C. "That's a leaky condo."

Not 50 yards from Saunders' windshield, scaffolding ringed a four-story building whose sieve-like exterior had been stripped down to insulation and rotting studs. Fixing it would cost $2 million to $3 million Canadian, Saunders said.

Driving from Stanley Park to False Creek, with high-rise condos passing her sunroof and low-rises passing her windows, Saunders cataloged the damage that has turned Vancouver from a world-class city to what one weary property manager recently called a "world-class disaster."

On West Sixth, she pointed to a building with black mold crawling beneath the roofline, a sign that water had crept behind the exterior and was rotting the building from within. The next two buildings were also damaged.

Around the block, a fourth building had its second-story decks rotting away.

"Here's another one," Saunders said, pointing to a mass of peeling pink stucco. "I could drive you through any number of neighborhoods in the city and you'll see the same thing."

With a limited land base and a culture that leans more toward inner-city living, Vancouver has a fondness for the condominium that's more pronounced than Seattle's.

But with a similarly wet environment and hot residential market, Seattle will find itself facing many of the same problems, experts say.

"You're just a few years delayed, but it's the same phenomenon," said Dave Barrett, a former provincial premier who headed up a recent commission to study construction problems in British Columbia condominiums.

"Nip it in the bud," said Tom Sigurdson, executive director of the B.C. and Yukon Building and Construction Trades Council.

LESSONS FROM THE NORTH

If it's any consolation, British Columbia's experience offers several possible lessons in what caused the problem, how to fix it and how to prevent it.

Among those most familiar with the leaky-condo problem are the engineers of Morrison Hershfield, a Canadian consulting firm that wrote a 1996 report on building exteriors for the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp.

In an interview, two of the firm's engineers blamed the problem on several factors: the use of one- and two-story building designs on taller buildings that catch extra rain and wind; "barrier design" or "face-sealed" cladding that is supposed to keep water out and can't dry out once it leaks; and fly-by-night contractors working with incomplete plans.

"Don't blame (building) code, don't blame municipalities, don't blame building inspectors," said Pierre Gallant, regional manager for Morrison Hershfield's Vancouver office.

"The bottom line is, it comes down to design and then following that properly. It starts with proper design and it continues with proper construction. Those are two key elements, in that order."

Vancouver developers blame bad maintenance and a building code that encourages wrapping buildings in plastic vapor barriers, trapping humidity and condensation.

But the problem lies more with the nature of water itself, Gallant said.

Designers and builders are naive to rely on walls that lack the air spaces to drain the water that gets behind them, he said.

"It's all been tried here and failed, so this is ridiculous," he said. "Water gets in everywhere, anywhere, any time. To try to make a face-sealed system work is a lost cause."

`MARKETPLACE GONE MAD'

The Barrett Commission blamed building techniques as well. Residential construction, it said, "has become an industry dependent more upon business finesse and marketing techniques than on down-to-earth building basics."

But the commission said such techniques grew in large part out of bad social climate.

"The building process has been undertaken in a largely unregulated residential construction industry, driven to the lowest common denominator by ruthless, unstructured competition," the report said.

Developers, contractors, builders, architects, engineers and inspectors "were either unaware of how to employ the appropriate technology or deliberately failed to create appropriate building designs ensuring that construction was of adequate quality."

In an interview overlooking English Bay, Barrett, a Seattle University graduate, was even more blistering in his assessment.

His commission, which held 29 hearings and heard from hundreds of beleaguered homeowners, was told about teenagers doing electrical wiring and workers who couldn't speak English being asked to interpret architectural drawings.

Barrett recalled one woman in her mid-80s who spoke of going nearly bankrupt paying for repairs.

"The most important thing I've lost in this experience is my trust in people," she said.

"This is a marketplace that has gone mad," Barrett said at one point, "with no morality, no ethics, no nothing."

"You can buy a toaster," he said at another point, "and have more consumer protection on that toaster than you can have on a condo."

MANDATORY WARRANTIES

Barrett's report made 82 recommendations, most of which were quickly adopted as law. Among the most significant changes are the licensing of residential builders and the creation of no-interest loans, funded by fees on new construction and administered by a Homeowner Protection Office, to pay for repairs. A mandatory home-warranty program, funded by developers, will guarantee a condominium is leak-free for five years and free of structural defects for 10 years.

The building industry has chafed at the thought of helping fund the Homeowners Protection Office and said it will have to pass its share of the cost - $1,000 per new unit - on to the consumer. That will only further hurt the residential housing market at a time when housing starts in B.C. dropped 25 percent this year, said Peter Simpson, chief operating officer of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders Association.

"The market for new homes has stopped dead in its tracks," he said.

The once-hot market for condominiums has fallen off as well.

Part of that drop, the Barrett report said, stems from "the resistance to buying potential problems."