Last summer’s collapse in Surfside, Fla., exposed a startling truth: There are thousands of aging condo buildings that could be next — and few steps being taken to prevent another tragedy.
On a bright afternoon in June, James McGuinness arrived in
the lobby of Champlain Towers South, one of the tallest
condo towers in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach. Like
its sister building, Champlain Towers North, the South tower
was built in 1981, in the midcentury modern style so beloved
by Florida developers of the era: squat and unlovely, with
an L-shaped Duplo block footprint and heavy concrete
balconies that jutted from the 13-story structure. Out back,
there was a garden, and beyond the garden, the sea.
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MIAMI BEACH |
Around 1:45 a.m., McGuinness was awakened
by the buzzing of his mobile phone on the bedside table. The
voice on the line belonged to Jason Greene, the assistant
town manager for Surfside. There’d been an incident at
Champlain Towers South. “Partial collapse, multiple
fatalities — that’s all he could tell me,” McGuinness said.
Outside, the air was choked with smoke and particulate
debris as fine as snow; emergency vehicles were shrieking up
Collins Avenue, the multilane thoroughfare that runs almost
the entire length of Miami Beach.
McGuinness rounded the corner and felt the air leave his
lungs. The building upon which he stood the previous day had
nearly vanished. In its place was a heap of concrete and
steel. “There was this tremendous gap in the horizon staring
back at me,” he said. “An unspeakable scene. Unspeakable
horror. That’s all I could think, even then: It was
unspeakable.”
The next afternoon, while rescue crews searched for
survivors, McGuinness appeared at an emergency meeting of
the Surfside Town Commission, a body made up of the mayor,
vice mayor and other elected officials. By the end of the
day, at least one person was pronounced dead, with 99
residents from the condo’s 135 units reportedly unaccounted
for; the final count would land at 98, making it one of the
deadliest engineering failures in the history of the United
States. Standing at the microphone, clad in a white polo
shirt and slacks, McGuinness warned of a coming reckoning —
one that would play out across the entire country. “This
terrible tragedy, which is a national tragedy, is going to
change the building codes as they relate to certification
and all existing buildings,” he said. “Because we’ve got to
remember, it’s not only the building itself. It’s what the
building is sitting on that also counts, big time.
Especially in the coastal environment.”
But meaningful reform, of the kind McGuinness imagined, has
long been notoriously hard to enact. Florida has roughly 1.5
million residential condo units — among the most of any
state — and a highly lucrative condo and co-op industry with
many powerful players, from management companies and
developers to firms specializing in condo law. Historically,
these groups, and the lobbyists who represent them, have
successfully pushed back against any policy they view as
constrictive or unduly expensive. And already, just months
after the collapse of Champlain Towers South, there are
signs that similar efforts are underway. “You’d hope that
this is the wake-up call,” Steven Geller, a longtime state
senator and representative, told me of Champlain Towers.
“But I’d anticipate the same thing we’ve seen since the
1980s. The same thing, incidentally, that you see with mass
shootings, or at least mass shootings back when they were
rare. The lobbying groups go out and go: ‘Listen, now is
really not the time to deal with this. Now is the time to
pray and heal. Let’s talk about it next year.’ Then next
year comes around, and guess what? It’s old news. Let me
tell you: I want to be wrong, but my experience says, ‘Be
realistic.’”
Pull up a map of the Florida coast, drop your finger onto
the surface and you’ll almost certainly land on a town or
city with its own disaster in the making. According to one
recent study, 918,000 of Florida’s condo units are, like the
ones in Champlain Towers South, more than 30 years old; many
towers were thrown up during the boom years, when oversight
was lax, developers were incentivized to prize speed over
attention to detail and every permit was a rubber stamp
away. Even in the most rigorously built structures, secured
to the face of the earth by heavy pylons driven through
yards of shifting sand, the coastal environment has
inevitably taken its toll. Facades are pitted by the salt
and sea air. Balconies are crumbling. Pool decks are
spidered with cracks. And water — and rising sea levels —
are a fact of life. Water on the roads, water slopping up
and out of the drains, water in subterranean garages and the
very foundations of condo towers packed with hundreds of
residents who are frequently blind to the dangers that lie
underfoot or, more tragic still, unable to fund the repairs
that could save their lives.
And time is running out. “It is a ticking-clock scenario,”
Eric Glazer, a veteran condo-law specialist told me. “A bomb
got set off, back in the day, and it’s about to go off.”
The town of Sunny Isles Beach, north of
Surfside. Andrew Moore for The New York Times, with drone
assistance from Jake Butters.
As recently as the 1890s, the nine-mile barrier island now
known as Miami Beach was little more than a fetid tangle of
swampland, dominated by the remains of a handful of old
coconut and avocado plantations. All had failed
spectacularly. The heat was tremendous, the rain torrential,
and as for the local fauna, it appeared to consist entirely
of violent bugs. “The mosquitoes were biting every exposed
inch of me,” Jane Fisher wrote in her memoirs, recalling a
visit she made in 1912, with her husband, Carl, a wealthy
developer. But Carl refused to be deterred. “I’m going to
build a city here,” he proclaimed. “A city like magic. Like
romantic places you read and dream about, but never see.”
There was precedent for what Fisher had in mind. Two decades
earlier, the oil baron Henry Flagler had extended his
Florida East Coast Railway all the way to Miami, largely on
the backs of poor Black inmates “leased” from local jails.
(Miami was almost called “Flagler,” he later claimed, until
a rare moment of humility spurred him to suggest the honor
go instead to a local Indigenous tribe, the Mayaimi.) As
Flagler’s rail line rolled south, massive hotels cropped up
in its wake, including the Royal Palm, an opulent resort
built in 1897 in Miami. On Miami Beach, Carl Fisher vowed,
he would replicate their grandeur. But in order to do so, he
would have to play God and entirely reshape the landscape.
A wooden bridge spanning Biscayne Bay was already under
construction; Fisher chipped in some funds to ensure its
completion and hired a crew of Black laborers, “armed with
saws and axes,” to scrub the beach clean of stubborn
vegetation. “They worked hip-deep in the mud, a pall of
smoke hanging over them because smudge pots and bonfires of
palmetto fiber were the only available defense against
clouds of mosquitoes and sandflies that made life miserable
for men and mules alike,” the Miami journalist and
conservationist Polly Redford recalled in a 1970 book, “The
Billion-Dollar Sandbar.” “When the many-branched mangrove
roots proved ruinously expensive to remove, they were cut
off two feet above the mud and left there for dredges to
cover later on.”
Far too late would residents of Miami Beach come to
appreciate the cost of eradicating the mangrove forests,
which function like natural storm walls, mitigating tidal
damage and blocking high winds. Less immediately
shortsighted was Fisher’s insistence on dredging six million
cubic yards of wet sand from the bottom of Biscayne Bay and
depositing it on the west side of the barrier island.
(Redford wrote: “A week or so was necessary for this soup to
congeal enough to support much weight, and during the
filling of Belle Isle” — off the island’s southwestern flank
— “two mules fell into it, and drowned.”) By 1916, Miami
Beach had nearly doubled in width, giving Fisher far more
seaside real estate to develop and sell; by 1931, dozens of
artificial islands had sprouted up in the bay. “So
thoroughly did founding father Fisher and his crews erase
most traces of nature,” the Miami Herald reporter Andres
Viglucci noted last year, “that it’s easy to forget today,
as Miami Beach marks its centennial as an incorporated city
in characteristically hyped-up fashion, just how completely
a manufactured place it is.”
The hitch with manufactured places, of course, is that they
tend to need constant care. Conjure a “magic” city from
sand, and you better be prepared to make sure it doesn’t
vanish back into sand again. Hence the canals gouged into
the island in the 1920s to relieve coastal pressure and
counter flooding; the barge-loads of crushed limestone
required to undergird the island’s first roads; and the
appearance of bulkheads, or retaining walls, along the
shore.
Fisher succumbed to a gastric hemorrhage in 1939, but the
push-and-pull between developers and nature would continue
for decades after his death, often in familiar ways, but
sometimes in entirely novel permutations. A filled-in beach
eroded, so more of the ocean floor was siphoned up to
replace what the sea had reclaimed. Rising tides overwhelmed
drains, so more complex systems were installed, along with
pumps that funneled street water back into the bay, where
they created dangerous algae blooms. Floodwater sluiced
through a basement, so the house was jacked up. Ditto the
parking lots, ditto the roads. “If you were from the Beach,
it was just part of life,” a friend, Buz Waitzkin, who grew
up in the area in the 1950s and 1960s told me. “You’d ride
along Biscayne Bay, and there were those giant dredges
literally creating islands. And if there was a big storm,
your street turned into a small creek. For days after a
hurricane, our house got sloshed and sprayed so many times
by drivers that we had to put a big sign out front: ‘Cars!
Watch your wake!’”
When I arrived at my hotel on Miami Beach, this past
October, a construction crew was busy raising the adjacent
boulevard. The work had been going on for close to three
years, the hotel’s receptionist said wearily: “But I’ve been
told it’s either that or we turn into Atlantis.” (He offered
me a cocktail coupon as an apology.) According to some
estimates, the race may be winnable in the short term, but
it won’t be cheap: The city estimates that the cost of
protecting Miami from rising tides over the next 40 years
will total nearly $4 billion. And even that staggering
effort might not be enough. “There are some areas where you
run the model now and you plug in the recommended pump
stations and outfalls and wells, you will find minimal to no
change with hundreds of millions of infrastructure,” Miami’s
deputy chief resilience officer, Chris Bennett, recently
reported. “There are cases where your engineering solutions
just won’t provide you any benefit.”
If you were to plot out the history of development on Miami
Beach, you would see two significant spikes. The first
arrived with Carl Fisher and ended with the Great
Depression. The second came after World War II, as a new
wave of developers, taking advantage of the growing
popularity of air travel, resuscitated Fisher’s idea of
Miami Beach as a playground for the rich. The island, the
editors at Life magazine noted in 1947, “offers an
impressive menu of divertissement: horse racing, dog racing,
swimming, deep-sea fishing, shopping, sunbathing, gambling,
nightclubbing, astrology, speedboating (sailing, being more
strenuous, is not so popular), pretty girls and a climate
which insures ‘359 warm, sunny days out of 365.’”
“I’ve got this old postcard, and it kind of explains it
all,” Eliot Kleinberg, a local historian and former
Miami-area reporter, told me. “The frame on the left has a
guy standing next to a snowman, and he’s shivering. But in
the frame on the right, he’s in the sun, and he’s grinning,
and he’s got a bikini babe on each side of him. It’s really
a distillation of what Florida was to previous generations.
And you absolutely can’t underestimate what kind of power it
had. People wanted to be here. Needed to be here. Florida
was a magnet, and if you lived in Boston or New York or
Philadelphia, or wherever, and you wanted warmth and sun,
you got pulled along.”
In 1940, Florida’s population was about 1.9 million. In
1950, the number was just shy of three million. “Then you
fast-forward a little more, and there are 22 million people
here,” Kleinberg recalled. “I watched it happen. It wasn’t
pretty. It was pretty if you were a contractor, but it
wasn’t pretty if you loved the natural world. Everything
vanished so fast you could almost see it happen with the
naked eye. I look back with great nostalgia and sorrow at
that time. I really do. We created homes for 22 million
people but paid a tremendous cost for it.”
In other parts of Florida, there was enough land for
developers to build out, in tessellating planned communities
that often extended no more than a couple of stories in
height. But on Miami Beach — both Miami Beach proper, which
had been incorporated as a city in 1915, and in nearby
communities such as Bal Harbour or Surfside — there was only
one direction to go. Through the 1960s, new towers sprung up
along the beach, many of them zoned for condominium use. So
unfamiliar was the word — the Federal Housing Administration
did not approve insurance for condos until 1961 — that one
local newspaper felt compelled to define “condominium” for
its readers: “It is what persons who like apartment living —
but want to own property complete with a title — have been
waiting for.” If Carl Fisher’s vision for Florida had hinged
on luxury for the extremely wealthy, the appeal of the condo
was essentially democratic; a middle-class retiree with
enough savings could afford the same sea view and beach
access as a millionaire. (Air-conditioning, which was
becoming more widely available, ensured that condo living
was comfortable, even in crowded, multistory towers.)
But in their rush to meet demand, developers often cut
corners when it came to construction materials or the
all-important substructures that kept buildings stuck to the
ground — a hazard given the frequency of violent storms on
the Florida coast. “It was the wild, wild West,” a longtime
Miami engineer named Eugenio Santiago told me. “You had
ground being broken every day, and the permitting people
were completely overwhelmed. They’d review the calculations
you submitted, and they tried to catch things, but stuff was
always going to slip through the cracks. Then you’d have the
guys who’d just take a glimpse and rub their hands on the
paper, sign it and hand it back.” (Santiago’s account is
supported by a contemporary interview with a retired
building official who told The Miami Herald that a lot of
inspection practices in the boom years were “a fiasco, a
joke” and not “worth a damn.”)
In 1974, a grand jury empaneled by Miami-Dade County
reviewed complaints from residents about the quality of
local construction and returned with an indictment of the
overly friendly relationship between many developers and
municipal officials — and the political pressure being
exerted on code inspectors. Local leaders, the report
warned, “must wake up to the fact that Building Departments
are to be established for the protection of the consumer and
not solely to bring revenue to the City and County.” Two
grand-jury investigations followed, in 1976 and 1990, each
more damning than the last. (The 1990 report, the most
strident in tone, included an account of a woman who
complained about incessant leaks, until one afternoon the
entire roof collapsed.) Record-keeping was lax to
nonexistent, the juries found; as for the inspectors, they
were often unqualified and just as often conspicuously lazy
— some had conducted drive-by “inspections” without ever
leaving their cars.
It wasn’t until Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, which killed 61
people and destroyed billions of dollars of property, that
lawmakers were jolted into forming a governmental panel, the
Lewis Commission, to investigate building practices in the
state. “The history of Florida mirrors the history of
America, in the sense that you can look back and see all
these obvious problems that no one is paying attention to
because they have dollar signs in their eyes,” Kleinberg,
the historian, said of the commission. “Then a tragedy
happens, and someone comes in and fixes it.” The commission
later issued nearly 100 recommendations on strengthening
local building codes. Among them: state-mandated structural
analyses of any tower or complex more than 40 years old.
A 40-year recertification program, which had been in place
in Miami-Dade County since the mid-1970s, was later adopted
by Broward County, a coastal area that encompasses Fort
Lauderdale and Hollywood. There is little doubt the policies
have made Florida safer. But it has also explicitly placed
the burden and responsibilities of the maintenance of older
buildings onto owners themselves — with predictable results.
“Look, maintenance takes effort, right?” says Allyn
Kilsheimer, the engineer hired by Surfside to investigate
the Champlain collapse. “And then it costs money to hire an
engineer to conduct the re-inspection in the first place,
and then it can cost a lot of money to do the required
work.” And frequently, owners balk at the expense.
“I’ll never forget going out to this condo complex on the
water, with a contractor, and looking at the corrosion on
some of the columns in the garage,” Eugenio Santiago told
me. “It wasn’t horrendous. I proposed removing the corroded
concrete and wire and pouring new concrete — the price would
have been about $3 million. The guy looks at me like I’m
crazy. A decade passes. I hear from someone at the same
building. I go back. The damage is worse. I say, ‘Now it’s a
$20 million job.’ Basically, you pay now or pay later, and
many people chose option No. 2.”
The realities of the modern condo board complicate matters
significantly: Although the original residents of a building
may have insight into how a structure is built, later owners
are typically left in the dark about the state of repairs.
Once they purchase a unit, they don’t want to be held
financially liable for wear and tear they didn’t inflict or
improvements they may not benefit from. “I use the green
banana metaphor,” says Bill Sklar, a lawyer and law
professor who has been working on condo issues in Florida
since 1980. “An older person goes to the supermarket and
sees some green bananas. But she buys the yellow ones,
because she’s not sure she’s going to be around long enough
to see the green bananas ripen. Now apply that to a condo
resident,” he went on. “Well, if you’ve $1,500 in the bank,
you take your grandkids on a vacation to Disney World. Or
you take them on a cruise.” And you vote no on authorizing
the repairs.
Over the years, would-be condo-law reformers in the Florida
Legislature have focused much of their energy on the policy
surrounding reserves — money set aside for repairs — and
so-called “reserve studies”: an estimate of how much money
should be set aside, based on an engineer’s evaluation of
the building. But few of these proposals have made it out of
committee and onto the floor for a vote. Fewer still have
been signed into law. “It took on a predictable pattern,”
says Steven Geller, a commissioner for Broward County who
spent 20 years as a state senator or representative.
“Someone would come along and try to strengthen the laws as
they pertained to reserves. And then the law firms
representing condo boards would fight back. They wanted to
keep their clients. And their clients — the boards or the
condo associations — didn’t want to pay when they thought
they shouldn’t have to.” Several Florida law firms were
involved in this kind of lobbying, but none more prominently
than Becker, a Fort Lauderdale firm that one former
Republican state representative, Julio Robaina, has
described as the “nemesis” of condo-law reformers. (“Becker
strongly refutes any accusation that the firm has opposed
community-association reform at any point in its history,”
Gary C. Rosen, the Becker managing shareholder and chief
executive, said in a statement.)
“A big firm like Becker, or a major lobbying group, they can
pay for charter buses and pack them with board members and
send them to Tallahassee,” Geller told me. “Suddenly, you’re
a legislator in a committee room that sits 200 people, and
180 of them are wearing red shirts indicating their
opposition to your legislation. And let’s be honest, all
right? That does affect legislators. It affects the governor
and the cabinet. And it affects the outcome of the
proposal.”
In 2008, for example, Robaina sponsored a bill requiring
condo boards to pay for a new reserve study every five
years. The bill was signed into law, but in neutered form:
In the 11th hour, lobbyists representing condo associations
insisted that boards be able to waive the requirement by a
simple majority vote. Two years later, in 2010, the law was
repealed in its entirety — largely, Robaina has claimed,
because of pressure from lobbyists and firms like Becker.
According to current and former legislators that I
interviewed, this has been a familiar dynamic in Tallahassee
in recent decades. Reform bills are advanced, lobbying
groups coalesce in opposition and one way or another, the
legislation is killed.
“The Florida government, for years, has allowed this to go
on, has allowed all these buildings to go up, with little
preparation for the day when they get old and need repairs,”
Eric Glazer, a Florida lawyer, told me recently. Glazer, who
writes a popular blog about Florida condo law, recalled
attending a 2018 board meeting at a condo complex for senior
citizens in Fort Lauderdale. On the agenda that night was an
assessment of $300 per owner to address plumbing problems in
the units. “I can’t tell you how many people came up to me
afterward, crying, weeping, saying, ‘We can’t afford it,’”
Glazer said. “I went home that night, and I wrote emails to
as many state legislators as I could, and begged them to do
something. I said, ‘Look, the state of Florida is about to
be in a tremendous, tremendous amount of trouble.’”
As it happens, that same year, a similar drama was playing
out on a much larger scale at Champlain Towers South — a
building with a tangled condo-boom history of its own.
According to The Miami Herald, one of the general
contractors on the project, Alfred Weisbrod, later lost his
state license after an investigation into complaints
involving “incompetency or misconduct”; the building’s
developer, Nathan Reiber, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and
was accused of “false and deceptive” entries in company
records.
In early 2018, Frank Morabito, an engineer working for the
condo board, conducted an inspection that revealed crumbling
concrete on the ground floor and significant corrosion to
the rebar that helped support the structure. Of particular
concern to Morabito was the concrete slab that underlaid the
pool deck; the original builders, Morabito concluded, had
made a “major error” in not canting the slab, which would
have prevented water from collecting in the building’s
substructure. To correct this error, together with other
necessary repairs to Champlain South, would cost
approximately $9 million, Morabito estimated. (Through a
representative, Morabito and his associates declined to
comment.) But the Champlain South board had nowhere near
that amount in reserve. For a year and a half, the owners
and board members bickered over how to proceed; many
residents supported raising money to pay for the proposed
fixes, but others recoiled at the steep costs. The
infighting grew so bitter that most of the board eventually
resigned.
“This pattern has repeated itself over and over, ego
battles, undermining the roles of fellow board members,
circulation of gossip and mistruths,” the chairwoman of the
board, Annette Goldstein, wrote in her resignation letter.
“I am not presenting a very pretty picture of the
functioning of our board and many before us, but it
describes a board that works very hard but cannot for the
reasons above accomplish the goals we set out to
accomplish.” Eventually, in 2020, several new board members
were elected, and a proposal was approved: Champlain Towers
South would take out a $12 million line of credit from a
Miami bank to address the most pressing of the suggested
repairs. Several months later, half the building shuddered
into dust.
Miami Beach was little more than
swampland as recently as the 1890s. Andrew Moore for The New
York Times, with drone assistance from Jake Butters.
Champlain Towers South fell at 1:20 a.m. on June 24. By 5
that morning, the survivors had been escorted to the
Surfside Community Center, a half mile to the north, where
they were joined by evacuated patrons of an adjacent hotel
and dozens of relatives of Champlain residents. “From that
point forward, we were all moving nonstop, and we
essentially didn’t stop moving for a week,” James McGuinness
recalled. Media gathered three rows deep on the periphery of
the collapse site; everywhere residents went, there was a
mic or camera in their faces. The phone in McGuinness’s
office, on the ground floor of the Surfside town hall, rang
nonstop. There was no shortage of condo towers in Surfside
as old or older than Champlain South. Could those structures
be on the verge of collapse, too? “Everyone was suddenly
acutely aware of every crack and crevice in their building,”
McGuinness said. “I would describe the level of panic and
nervousness as extremely elevated.”
To try to ease residents’ minds, McGuinness drafted a memo,
asking “owners of buildings over 30 years old and over 3
stories in height to begin assessing their buildings for
recertification in advance of their 40-year deadline.”
McGuinness delivered many of the documents himself,
sometimes adding a handwritten note at the top: “Don’t wait.
Accelerate!! No esperé. Aceleré!! We are aggressively ‘in
front of the fix!’”
On Friday, June 25 — the same day as the emergency meeting —
McGuinness, Kilsheimer and other officials and lawyers
gathered in a conference room to discuss what may have
caused the collapse. Among the documents that were reviewed
was a stack of email correspondence between members of the
condo board and Ross Prieto, McGuinness’s predecessor as
Surfside’s chief building official. “Seeing those emails was
a holy-[expletive] moment,” said Eliana Salzhauer, a
first-term commissioner who had come to the offices to speak
to McGuinness and Kilsheimer. “Like, ‘How did we not know
about this?’”
The emails showed that Prieto had been sent the report
submitted by Frank Morabito, the engineer hired by Champlain
Towers South. Prieto never responded in writing, but he
informed the condo board that the building was “in very good
shape,” according to minutes from a board meeting. (Prieto
declined to comment for this article.) Salzhauer was also
troubled by an exchange between Prieto and a condo-board
member named Mara Chouela, who had complained to Prieto
about construction at an adjacent lot, a Renzo
Piano-designed condo tower to be called Eighty Seven Park.
Residents reported feeling tremors in Champlain South, and
Chouela sent a photo of a large backhoe working right next
to Champlain’s parking garage and pool deck. Could a town
official come check? “There is nothing for me to check,”
Prieto fired back. Surfside directly borders Miami Beach,
and the construction site fell under that town’s purview.
In November, at a Starbucks in Surfside, Salzhauer pulled
out her iPhone and showed me some of the information that
had since emerged on the Eighty Seven Park site. The city of
Miami Beach, several media outlets had reported, had amended
its height regulations to accommodate the construction of
the 18-story building. And the developers had been allowed
to take ownership of the street between Champlain Towers
South and Eighty Seven Park, which is how the backhoe that
Chouela spotted got so close to the former building.
Survivors and relatives of victims of the collapse have
since filed a lawsuit claiming the work on Eighty Seven Park
contributed to the tragedy. The developers, in turn, point
to the condo board at Champlain Towers South as the problem.
“As numerous media reports have documented, Champlain Towers
South was improperly designed, poorly constructed,
significantly underfunded and inadequately maintained and
repaired,” David Weinstein, a lawyer for the developers
said. He expected that “a full review of the facts and the
ongoing investigation” by the federal government would
“affirm” the developer’s position.
Salzhauer told me that she wasn’t yet sure what to make of
the allegations regarding Eighty Seven Park. “But I do know
one thing: We’ve got to stop being passive and start being
proactive,” she said. As a comparison, she cited the
response to the Ford Pinto in the 1970s, when it was
discovered that the model was prone to explosions in
rear-end collisions: “We found the life-threatening defect,
and the car was pulled off the road.” She added: “Now I’m
not saying that we need to evacuate every old building in
Surfside. But I am saying that we need to have more regular
inspections and we need to change the way we’re measuring
safety. Because we’re learning so much about sea-level rise
and climate change and we’re realizing that a lot of our old
measures are outdated.”
In commission meetings last summer and fall, Salzhauer, a
television producer and former prosecutor, has pushed
Surfside to modify its re-inspection program and pay for
subterranean analysis along the beach, which might help
identify geological weaknesses that could threaten other
buildings. Just weeks after the collapse in Surfside, Boca
Raton had already passed its own ordinance requiring 30-year
recertification of condo towers and apartment buildings over
three stories or 50 feet in height; the Surfside commission
did not formally consider a similar proposal from Salzhauer
until mid-January. (It will go to a vote in February.)
Salzhauer told me that members of the commission had been
reluctant to act until they knew exactly what happened.
But a definitive answer as to the cause of the collapse, if
it ever comes, is likely to be years away: The National
Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal body in
charge of the investigation, recently said it was processing
rock and soil samples from the site, along with “a review of
historic, geologic, design and construction information,”
but stopped short of providing a timeline for completion.
And Allyn Kilsheimer, Surfside’s own investigator, has
struggled to get access to the site. In November, the
Surfside commission passed a motion providing additional
funding for the investigation, but according to Salzhauer,
it was a struggle to even get it to a vote.
Carl Fisher, the wealthy developer, proclaimed his vision
for Miami in the early 1900s: “A city like magic. Like
romantic places you read and dream about, but never see.”
The collapse of Champlain Towers South has had a polarizing
effect on residents of Surfside, who have found themselves
stuck between two camps: those who want to act decisively to
strengthen local and state condo policy and those who regard
it as an expensive infringement on their liberty.
“When you first called me, you said you were interested in
understanding how the community responded to this tragedy,”
Salzhauer told me. “But I’ll be honest. I think the real
story now is, how does the community not respond? Certain
people seem to want to forget, to move on. I understand that
impulse; it’s self-protective. But that doesn’t make it
right. I mean, we had nearly a hundred human beings die
here.”
I later learned that Salzhauer’s “certain people” included
one very prominent figure: the mayor of Surfside, a real
estate investor named Charles W. Burkett, currently serving
his third nonconsecutive term in office. (He won his most
recent election, in March 2020, by a margin of exactly 50
votes out of a little more than 1,200 cast.) Salzhauer and
Burkett have never gotten along. In June of 2020, in an
exchange covered widely in the local press, Salzhauer
flipped off Burkett, who had muted her during a heated
commission debate over proposed anti-hate legislation.
(Burkett wanted to add “evangelical Christians” to the list
of protected groups.) She has subsequently described Burkett
as a “pig”; she suggested to me that the mayor was
politically disinclined to pursue the kind of reform that
might upset conservative business interests in the state.
The national scrutiny over the Champlain Towers tragedy
hasn’t helped their relationship. At one commission meeting
that I attended, the pair talked at each other, but never to
each other, in increasingly tense tones. “I would say that
the mayor and the commissioner represent different extremes
in terms of what needs to be done,” one municipal employee,
who requested anonymity in fear of retaliation, told me.
“Which can often make it difficult to get things done.”
Burkett, who has expressed interest in running for governor,
prefers to give interviews to Fox News, but in November, he
agreed to a “friendly chat” at his home on the west side of
Surfside. He showed me into his living room, which is
dominated by picture windows that frame Biscayne Bay as
neatly as a watercolor portrait. “Paradise,” he smiled
happily.
Burkett’s viewpoints can be hard to pin down. He told me
that he accepted the reality of climate change — he’d seen
with his own eyes that the sea levels around his private
dock were climbing. And he was as wary as anyone about the
pace of development in Miami Beach, where, he stressed, the
towers rise so high that some residents rarely catch a
glimpse of the sun. He was determined to keep the “small
town” feel of Surfside any way he could, he said.
But when it came to the collapse, he was unequivocal: It was
a true aberration, unlikely to be repeated. “I’ve said this
publicly: this doesn’t happen in America,” he told me.
“There’s something really wrong here. Really wrong. Listen,
I’m a real estate guy, and I’ve been around buildings my
whole life. As a matter of fact, I started my career doing
historic renovations in South Beach on those Art Deco
buildings down there. I did a bunch of them. I understand
how buildings are built and how they stand up. And, you
know, it was my contention that you wouldn’t have had to
lift a finger for four years and that building still
shouldn’t have fallen down. There was a trigger, there was
something that happened.”
Burkett referred me to a tweet purportedly sent by John
McAfee shortly before the software magnate’s death in a
Spanish prison, which claimed that he’d stored dozens of
terabytes of secret information “in my condo near 88th
Street and Collins Avenue just north of Miami Beach” — the
cross streets of Champlain South. Had someone set off a bomb
in the building to prevent McAfee’s secrets from being
revealed? “It’s not conclusive,” Burkett allowed. He said
he’d seen The Miami Herald refer to the tweet as “likely
fake.” But “likely fake,” Burkett went on, “means
potentially real.” He told me that he had pleaded with law
enforcement to get in touch with executives at Twitter to
get to the bottom of the matter. “If it’s not real,” he
said, “we check the box and we move on. Nobody’s done that.”
(Several news organizations have concluded McAfee did not
send the message or own a unit in Champlain Towers; the
“tweet” in question was probably doctored.)
It’s easy to see why this line of reasoning appeals to
Burkett. If the collapse was a freak event, current and
potential residents will fret less over the safety of
Surfside’s buildings. And less money will need to be
expended on the type of initiatives floated by Salzhauer and
her supporters. “When you demand more compliance — and
that’s not to say that we weren’t demanding compliance, it’s
just it wasn’t being enforced — but when you demand it and
you enforce it, that’s going to drive prices up,” Burkett
told me. “And of course, then, you’re squeezing the balloon
here and you’re going to puff it up over there. What’s the
result of that? Housing is not going to be affordable. So
you’re going to displace a lot of people.”
Burkett wasn’t necessarily opposed to more enforcement, he
said, but he believed residents should go into the
discussion with their eyes wide open as to the costs. Once
the cause of the collapse had been determined, “and it could
be shown that that building fell for a certain reason, that
would give us certainty, but we have no certainty. The
uncertainty right now is creating a plethora of different
sort of” — he steepled his fingers before finishing his
thought — “reactive situations.”
Salzhauer had used the Ford Pinto to make her argument for
pursuing code reform. Burkett opted for a different analogy.
“It’s sort of like what toxic mold was to real estate 25
years ago,” he said. “Toxic mold was a concoction of the
media and trial lawyers. But I know as an apartment-building
owner for years and years, we were all frightened to death
of toxic mold. You could lose your building; they would shut
you down. The guys with spacesuits would have to come in,
and it was this whole sort of theater. And in the end, there
really wasn’t toxic mold. There was mold that was bad, and
there were cases where there were infestations of mold.” But
the issue wasn’t as widespread or urgent as it was made out
to be, he said. He continued: “When you try to say,
‘Everything is the worst,’ you lose the argument. You lose
people.”
“So when you apply that to Champlain Towers?” I asked.
“I think that it goes back to the fact that we don’t know
why the building fell down,” he said. “And it leaves us with
many unknowns, and it allows the imagination to race and go
into places where it never would have otherwise gone. And
imagine all kinds of terrible things.”
While the local press has been busy tracking every new flap
in the Burkett and Salzhauer saga — the mayor recently made
the Miami New Times’s 2021 list of Worst People of the Year
— a different and far more consequential legal battle has
been playing out at the state level.
A couple weeks after the fall of Champlain South, a task
force was convened by the Florida Bar to discuss potential
changes to condo law in the state. Bill Sklar, the longtime
condo lawyer, had been named chairman. “I’ll give you the
one-minute conclusion: Unlike commercial buildings, unlike
office buildings, unlike city and county buildings — unlike
residential buildings — condo associations have no
standardized, baseline maintenance protocol,” Sklar told me.
“No inspection standard or requirement,” in Miami-Dade and
Broward Counties outside the 40-year recertification
program. “Too much is being left up to chance.”
Among the recommendations collected by Sklar’s task force
are an inspection schedule for condo boards; standardized
maintenance protocol; and a mandatory minimum reserve for
every Florida condo. Although there is no reason to believe
that “any significant percentage” of the state’s condos are
“not well maintained,” the report reads, “the Task Force
finds the lack of uniform maintenance standards or
protocols, and the broad discretion given to boards to
determine when, how and if life-safety inspections and
necessary repairs should be performed, requires legislative
intervention.”
Crucially, the most potentially controversial aspect of the
Florida Bar’s report — the mandatory minimum reserve — was
not given the same priority by the authors of a different
report published last fall, this one from the government of
Broward County. For good reason, says Steven Geller, who is
serving as the task force’s chairman: A minimum-reserve
statute would be unlikely to pass. “You’ve got to understand
that I’ve been through this,” Geller told me. “I’ve watched
mandatory-reserve legislation get introduced. I’ve watched
them fail. There are a lot of people in this state who
believe that Big Government — that’s pronounced ‘Big Gummint’
— shouldn’t be telling them what to do in their ‘castle.’
And then you’ve got the lobbies and law firms. You’ve got to
go in with what will actually pass, and anything that’s seen
as draconian isn’t going to cut it.”
On the off chance something substantive does make it through
the Florida Legislature, it would still have to go to Gov.
Ron DeSantis for a signature. “And that’s a long shot,” says
Jason Pizzo, a state senator whose district encompasses
Surfside. “The governor, I’m guessing, would not like to
deal with any of this during the 2022 election cycle. We’ve
got millions of people vacationing in Florida in condos, and
if you start taking harsher measures, that could get costly
and unpopular.” In recent years, Pizzo has introduced
several bills trying to tighten and reform condo codes in
the state; none of the legislation has even made it to
committee. Still, Pizzo has pressed forward with a new bill,
called S.B. 880, that would require condo associations to
regularly post inspection results to the building’s website
and to respond rapidly and in full to any resident requests
for additional safety-related information. It hasn’t been
scheduled for a vote.
Pizzo, who told me that it was the “worst kept secret in the
world” that lobbyists had used their influence to scuttle
previous bills, was realistic about the root causes of the
predicament in which Florida finds itself: It will take
money to prevent another Champlain Towers South and money to
ensure all older condos in the state meet code. And no one
is racing to open their pockets. “You come out of a tragedy
like this, and it’s absolute outrage, and people are
furious,” Pizzo told me. “I can see a world in which
policymakers and legislators get together and say, ‘Hey,
guess what, we’ve got a solution, and it’s the following:
You’re going to have to pay an extra $120 a year to your
condo association.’ And people just go, ‘Screw that!’”
One recent afternoon, I had coffee with a Surfside resident
named Robert Lisman, who lives with his wife and their young
children in Champlain Towers East, a smaller, newer cousin
building to the South and North towers. Lisman had been
following the progress of bills like Pizzo’s carefully. “The
thing I keep hoping is that what we’ve just been through —
nearly 100 people who fell asleep and had a building fall on
them — is enough of a nightmare to bring change,” he told
me. But echoing Salzhauer’s sentiments, he added that he
sensed a lot of “forgetfulness happening.”
In late June, just days after the collapse of Champlain
Towers South, Lisman tracked down the building manager for
Champlain East and asked if anyone had reported any problems
with his tower. He told me the building manager paused, as
if he was considering how to respond. “Finally, he goes,
‘All right, come with me.’” Lisman said. “We go down to the
garage.” The manager pointed to a column, which was
sufficiently cracked to expose a few tendrils of rebar.
Lisman stared. Residents of Champlain South, he knew, had
also complained about damage to the columns in their garage.
“But the manager said: ‘Don’t worry. I called a structural
engineer, and he said for me to hit it with a hammer, and if
it sounds hollow, you’ve got a problem,’” Lisman recalled.
The column wasn’t hollow, the manager said. He asked Lisman
not to cause alarm among other residents.
A few days later, Lisman persuaded James McGuinness to have
the column inspected; the walk-through, conducted by Allyn
Kilsheimer, revealed “nothing that indicated the possibility
of immediate collapse.” But as Kilsheimer stressed to me, he
does not have the ability to see through concrete. A
walk-through was just that — it was no stand-in for a
substantive analysis. When an engineering firm hired by the
Champlain East Board finally issued its own report, it left
Lisman with more questions than answers. The building
appeared generally sound, the firm said. But residents only
had access to preliminary reports, and at board meetings,
the board members, accompanied by a lawyer for Becker, “only
talked about the good parts,” Lisman said. “If they have
nothing to hide, they should be able to speak and be
transparent to residents.” Lisman is now part of a
class-action lawsuit filed against Champlain Tower East’s
board; the suit, which he declined to discuss in-depth,
claims that the condominium board has neglected upkeep of
the building, thus devaluing the worth of the individual
units. (Champlain Towers East did not respond to requests
for comment.)
For now, Lisman, like thousands of condo-unit owners across
the state, finds himself stuck in a nightmarish predicament
— one with profound personal and financial implications. To
give up on Champlain Towers East and move to a newer
building on the South Florida coast would almost certainly
be restrictively expensive: Median house prices are soaring;
the real estate market is sloshing with investor cash. But
the dangers of staying put are potentially even greater.
Because not only does staying mean jousting with a
recalcitrant board protected by expensive lawyers or being
saddled with repair bills the reserve funds are unable to
cover, it also means accepting the twinned threats of
climate change and rising tides. It means living in an aging
building on an artificially widened sandbar that erodes a
little more every year. It means risk, not just of losing
your home but maybe even of dying in it, in another
unspeakable tragedy.
“When we bought the unit, we thought we’d live there
forever,” Lisman says. “And then one day, I’d give the
apartment to my kids. The idea of leaving or moving out
wasn’t something that ever crossed my mind,” he says. “At
this exact moment, I’m determined to stay. But five years
down the line? Ten years? That I can’t tell you.
The city estimates that the cost of protecting Miami from
rising tides over the next 40 years will total nearly $4
billion.