While America have a big problem in public and private infrastructure, I've been wondering in my head about the problem even at small scale in cities and village here in France.

We have a ton of old buildings, privately owned. Mine included, where it's a small building of 4 floors and 4 owners. One appartement per floor. It's so hard to get people into investing money without any monetary return. We fix problems after they happen. We waited for the rain pipe to break to fix it, we waited for the balcony to leak in order to fix it etc..

In Marseille two buildings collapsed right in the center of city. They were decrepit and owned by a company who never invested a dim despite problem reported. People actually died.

I wonder how many time it need to happen until we wake up?

I'm managing my coproperty, and it's so hard to even find what kind of local/governmental help we can get. We would be very happy to redo insulation and building beams if it was possible to co-finance it which public/city money.

But instead the norm seems to let 150 years old building (built with good materials) getting destroyed and build new cheap reinforced concrete one.

Is it really cheaper to pop ton of buildings which will not even last 50 years? What is there no incentive to help privately owned building maintenance?