Where did the building fund go?
Every apartment block is a small state with a treasury, a budget and an election, run on a notebook nobody is allowed to see. It is the most common institution in the world and the least accountable.
Two hundred flats, a monthly fee from each, a manager, a notebook. Once a year there is a meeting in the lobby where a photocopied sheet is distributed, nobody understands the elevator maintenance line, three people raise their voices, the accounts are approved because it is late and everyone has to work in the morning. Between meetings the fund is a black box. The lift breaks, the roof leaks, the money is short. Nobody says the word corruption; everyone half-suspects it; nothing can be checked.
An apartment block is a state in miniature: it taxes, it budgets, it procures, it elects, and it has no opposition, no press and no auditor. It is the most common institution on earth, and the least accountable one.
What changes
Four ordinary parts, wired the ordinary way.
The fund becomes a treasury with a spend policy. Money leaves it only against an appropriation line, lift, cleaning, garden, reserve, and only up to that line's remainder. There is no path from the fund to an unbudgeted payment, and the manager's own signature does not create one. Overspending is not forbidden; it is refused.
The budget is voted, not announced. The lines are set by a vote of the residents' registry, in advance, per period. A new period starts empty: authority to spend lapses by default and must be granted again. The meeting stops being an approval ceremony for money already gone.
Every payment writes itself into the record. Not into a notebook that lives in one person's flat, but into a ledger every resident reads from their phone, line by line, dated. Nobody needs to trust the manager to know where the money went, which is, incidentally, the greatest favour you can do an honest manager.
Contracts get an escrow and a deadline. The roof job is a work order: the bounty is locked when the job is commissioned, released when the work is accepted, refunded automatically if the deadline passes with nothing delivered.
The dull miracle is what disappears: the annual argument, the photocopied sheet, the suspicion that has no way of being confirmed or dismissed.