You see it in every city around the world. Decaying, condemned  buildings and infrastructure like roads and bridges are rampant across North America.

Take our city, for example. Recently a parking garage owned by the city was closed without notice — shut down permanently. Why? The structural integrity of the garage was gone. The risk of a major structural failure caused its condemnation, sentenced to death.

What caused it? According to a buddy of mine—a person in the know, it was the total absence of any preventative maintenance over the last twenty years of the structure’s life. Built in the 60’s, nothing was done to this building since the mid 90’s.

Chunks of cement were falling off the building. Re-bar, the bones of the building, was rusted out, its integrity gone. The expansion joints—engineering features put in buildings in our climate to combat the temperature extremes—long ago lost their seal, allowing water to penetrate the structure and do its damage.

So what do we have? A building with eroded bones, a ton of oxidation rusting it out, its skin and body parts falling off, and its strength depleted and all but gone.

The building is now closed and scheduled for tear down. It’s dead.

Funny how this parallels so much of what we see today in people.

Condemned Bodies

Like buildings, you see decaying people walking around every day in every city across North America. Their bodies are falling apart. Skeletal structures weakened. Their bodies are full of oxidized cells and inflammation.

Leaky guts. Leaky bowels. Clogged arteries. Immobile joints.

The cause? Lifestyle. Lack of preventative maintenance. Idleness. Lack of movement. Poor dietary choices.

I have been in the property management industry for many years. I’ve seen old properties well maintained—buildings fifty, sixty years old still functional, attractive, and ‘healthy’. And I’ve seen plenty of the opposite—deferred maintenance, problems left to fester, a reluctance to spend money today to nip a problem in the bud.

Unfortunately, with buildings, like with our bodies, you can pay now, or you can pay later.

Paying later always costs more and is often too late. Just ask the folks at the city who now have nowhere to park. Or the families of heart attack victims who never made it to the hospital.