Hi, I'm Dan Fromak and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Thursday, July 8.

The White House is leaning in to clean power mandates, spectators are being kept out of the Tokyo Olympics,

and we're focused on America's condo culture.

Two weeks ago today, a 12-story condo tower in Surfside, Florida collapsed, stunning the

country. As of yesterday, 54 people are confirmed to have died, while 86 people remain

missing. Investigators still don't know what caused the structure to fall, including what

role rising

saltwater sea levels may or may not have played in corroding the concrete. But Surfside has

already begun to spark a broader conversation about the safety of condo buildings, which house

around one out of every five Americans and around one out of every three Floridians. Some of this is about building codes

and building code enforcement, but the bigger part might be about condo management and conflicting

incentives when it comes to maintenance. In Surfside, that manifested itself in disagreements

and indecision over what to do about a 2018 engineering report showing the need for major fixes,

which would have required big dollars from each condo owner. Those fixes weren't made.

So today we want to go deeper into these fundamental flaws with Peter Coy of Bloomberg Business

Week, who recently wrote a piece about how condo buildings are quote-unquote ticking time bombs. That conversation

in 15 seconds. We're joined now by Peter Coy, economics editor at Bloomberg Business Week.

Peter, your story quoted a law professor who called condo buildings, quote, a ticking time bomb.

What did he mean by that? He meant that we have

two problems. One is the quality of the buildings themselves. They're getting old. And things

are happening that happen to older buildings. Concrete is starting to deteriorate, plumbing systems,

...