Offbeat

It's still morally wrong even in condo situations. In fact, it's even more unethical, as it's a lot harder to walk away from an owned condo than an apartment lease.

Democracy is not a substitute for morality. If a slight majority votes to murder everyone in a minority, that does not make it ethical.

Imagine a 5 story condo building. Everyone bought units expecting elevators to be free to use. The agreement from the beginning was that maintenance would be shared among all owners. Every condo owner bought their unit agreeing to this deal.

Then after some time some dingbat proposes making the elevator pay-to-use. The people on the ground floor don't need elevators, so they vote in favor of the change. Each higher floor has fewer people vote in favor of it. Those on the top two floors vote near-unanimously against the proposal, but it passes anyway. Those on the upper floors, dependent on the elevator, have to shoulder all the cost.

Think of the situation those people on the upper floors are in. They might be retirees living on fixed incomes. They bought their condo knowing they could afford the maintenance fees. They bought knowing the agreement was that all maintenance would be shared by all. But now the folks on the lower floors have gone back on their word and decided they don't want to pay for the maintenance on the elevators they have little use for.

This is a way for the residents of the lower floors to take advantage of the folks on the upper floors. The upper floor units would have very low market value without a working elevator. When the building was built, those upper units sold at the same or higher prices than the lower units. If the upper units had to be sold for half the cost of the lower units, then the cost of the lower units would have had to have been much higher to make the project viable to construct.

We're used to upper floors of tall buildings selling for more because of views. But historically this didn't happen. Historically, ground floors commanded the highest rents. The elevators in a condo building allow the ground floor owners to purchase units much more cheaply than they otherwise would be able to. And now those ground floor owners are trying to both benefit from the reduced purchase price AND offload the elevator maintenance costs to the upper floors.

Shared ownership would be different