[OTownandDown]

Much like facadism, blaming the owner for neglect and the city for not acting after a collapse is wrong headed. Our society needs to be better at ensuring proper maintenance of a heritage listed property, rather than trying to provide life support after a collapse. Until we're better at encouraging maintenance, this is going to keep happening. And maintenance can only be afforded to the extra-rich landlords such as governments, and even they are not good at it.

Anyways, ranting aside, I've no doubt that compounding deterioration from years of neglect caused the collapse.

However in times like these, why bother trying to preserve the structure intact, especially given our facadism society?

Why not disassemble the entire thing, restore the mansard tin, and let someone build a new building with a stone facade and the mansard and bing bang boom nobody's any the wiser.

As an added benefit, you'd get the opportunity to actually restore the stone components, instead of those ridiculous concrete-encapsulated window lintels on the 1st floor, and create an accessible front entrance.

The total cost of preserving those heritage elements in new build is probably between $400-800k, and allowing a developer to actually make money by building something new behind would ensure it gets done.