High-Rise Hysteria After Surfside

McKenzie Santvil was at work when he received a call that he had 45 minutes to go back home and grab whatever he could carry.

“The police escorted me to my room,” he recalled.

Santvil didn’t have enough time to grab much, and it would be another week before he could return to Crestview Towers Condominium, a 10-story, 156-unit residential building at 2025 NE 164th St. in the City of North Miami Beach. Even then, he had just 15 minutes to collect more of his belongings, and he had to do it under police escort. After that, he spent the rest of the month living in his Nissan Hatchback. He planned to move into a new apartment elsewhere in North Miami Beach on Aug. 1.

A renter, Santvil wasn’t evicted. He and about 300 of his neighbors, including children and elderly residents as well as renters and condo owners, were evacuated from Crestview July 2, the same day city officials finally received an overdue engineering survey report, dated Jan. 11, for that 51-year-old building’s recertification – a requirement in Miami-Dade and Broward counties for all buildings once they hit the age of 40, and every 10 years thereafter. In that 11-page report, professional engineer Robert Barreiro stated that due to numerous instances of corroded steel and spalling concrete, Crestview was not structurally safe “for continued occupancy.”

“That was the whole basis of us shutting that building down,” said Arthur “Duke” Sorey III, North Miami Beach’s city manager. “We acted in an abundance of caution to move everyone out of that building.”

Things piled on from there.

The Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department declared that there were so many fire code violations in Crestview that they would have to all be addressed before people could be let back into the building. The city of NMB is still not convinced that people can live in Crestview while repairs are made, in spite of subsequent reports from the condo association that they could. And, following several allegations, the NMB Police Department and other agencies are investigating the association’s current and past members for mismanagement and theft. Residents, meanwhile, were finally allowed to arrange to pick up their furniture by appointment after July 26.

Closer Looks Kicked Off by Tragedy

The spark that started the evacuation of Crestview in the first place was the sudden collapse of an oceanfront condominium seven miles away in Surfside. On June 24 at 1:25 a.m., Champlain Towers South, a 40-year-old oceanfront 13-story building at 8777 Collins Ave. suddenly collapsed, killing at least 97 people. The exact cause (or causes) for the disaster is still unknown, but media reports soon surfaced about the building’s poor structural condition. Two days later, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava ordered an audit of buildings over five stories tall that have not yet completed their recertification within unincorporated Miami-Dade. Municipalities throughout Miami-Dade and Broward launched their own reviews of thousands of buildings in the midst of their own recertification processes.

As of deadline, seven residential buildings and the 1920s-era Miami-Dade courthouse have been closed in this county. Two of the residential buildings were evacuated after structural failures following torrential rainstorms: plaster falling from a balcony of an eight-unit, 58-year-old apartment building in Wynwood at 533 NW 32nd St. and a roof collapse at the 49-year-old, 28-unit Lakewood Gardens condo near Hialeah. Three Miami Beach condominiums, a North Beach apartment building and a Surfside condo – constructed between the 1930s and the 1960s – were ordered emptied following inspections.

Additionally, residents of at least three condo buildings aren’t able to venture on their balconies after building officials declared them unsafe: the 54-year-old Harding Hall at 8233 Harding Ave. in Miami Beach, the 52-year-old Coronado Towers Condominium at 12950 NE 16th Ave. in North Miami and the 51-year-old Royal Oaks Condominium at 1175 Miami Gardens Dr. in unincorporated Ives Estates. And in Sunny Isles Beach, the 40-year-old parking garage of the Winston Towers 600 was emptied of cars and buttressed with metal shoring after rusted rebar was found throughout that structure, according to an NBC 6 news report.

That’s probably not the end of it. Thousands of older buildings are still being examined in Miami-Dade and elsewhere in the state of Florida.

“I would anticipate [the evacuations] will escalate as these [violation] reports get scrutinized,” predicted Frank Rollason, director of emergency management in Miami-Dade County.

Eric Glazer, a homeowner association attorney who hosts an AM radio condo law show on 850 WFTL, said that some building owners, particularly condo associations, didn’t take recertifications seriously. Glazer noted that prior to the Champlain Towers South disaster, it was “very, very, very rare” for a residential building to be declared unsafe and evacuated, even if its owners didn’t submit a recertification report. Inspectors weren’t even required to visit a building undergoing recertification. Instead, building officials act on a “trust system” that the reports sent by landowners and associations are authentic.

“Building officials are now personally visiting buildings five stories or higher. Why haven’t they done that for the last 50 years?” Glazer asked.

Structural Defects Old & New

The recertification law came into existence in Miami-Dade County (then just Dade County) in 1975, a year after the sudden collapse of a 40-year-old office building in downtown Miami that was used by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

“It wasn’t that big. It was three stories. It had 150 people in it. Seven were killed,” recalled John Pistorino, a partner in the engineering firm of Pistorino & Alam, who helped craft the recertification law.

The basis for the recertification law is simple: Although Florida’s salty sea air is corrosive to concrete and steel, there’s no reason why a building can’t last a hundred years or more, if you maintain it.

“We have a lot of older buildings, famous hotels up and down constructed in the 1940s and 1950s that are operating now in Miami because the building owners are taking care of them,” Pistorino said.

This actually means that building owners should not wait for the 40-year mark to properly maintain a building, he insisted. Maintenance, repairs and periodic waterproofing should begin right after a building is completed.

Unfortunately, many condo associations are reluctant to charge special assessments or collect reserve funds for periodic and emergency maintenance, attorney Glazer said.

“They kick the can down the road and when a bunch of things go bad, there is no money in the pot to use,” he said. “They’re faced with a massive special assessment or taking out massive loans.”

On top of that, state law allows homeowners associations to waive the charging of emergency reserve fund every year, which is something that condo associations routinely do, Glazer added.

But it isn’t just older buildings with structural defects. Jason Rodgers-da Cruz, an attorney who represents condo associations in complex litigation, said even brand-new buildings have structural issues that must be addressed, like improper waterproofing at the pool deck or improperly applied stucco – things that can lead to structural deterioration in a building if condo owners are not on top of them.

“You always see the construction defects in a lot of the new towers,” Rodgers-da Cruz said. “It’s so common that the Florida Legislature granted condo unit owners a statutory warrant [of up to three years] with developers.”

Potential condo buyers need to be careful, too. Florida law doesn’t require association members to tell contracted buyers about any structural issues in the building – just what the assessment fees are and what they’re used for, Glazer said.

Developing Accountability

Aside from Miami-Dade and Broward (which adopted an Older Building Safety Program that took effect in 2006), recertification of older buildings isn’t required elsewhere in the state. Nevertheless, other tragic disasters helped influence the creation of other statewide structural laws.

In 1981, the nearly completed Harbour Cay Condominium in Cocoa Beach suddenly collapsed while concrete was being poured onto a roof, killing 11 construction workers and wounding another 23 individuals. Two years later, the state legislature passed a law requiring that buildings over 50 feet tall or with an occupancy of more than 500 people be examined by a threshold inspector during the course of construction. In 1998, six years after Hurricane Andrew, the Florida Building Code was passed, enhancing regulations for new structures built after 2002.

In the wake of Champlain Towers South, new laws are being proposed. The elected bodies of Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties are contemplating their own versions of recertification codes for older buildings. Meanwhile, in Miami-Dade County, on Aug. 10, the City of Aventura will vote on an ordinance requiring homeowners and condo associations to provide the city with copies of their recertification reports within 24 hours of receipt or face fines of $500 a day or 60 days in prison.

Allen Douglas, executive director of the Florida Engineering Society and the American Council of Engineering Companies of Florida, said several Florida engineers are now having biweekly meetings to discuss new standardized and cost-effective statewide requirements for buildings constructed in the Sunshine state.

“We will hopefully make some recommendations on things [building owners] can do in the short term and long term,” said Douglas, who is based in Tallahassee. “We also want to make sure we don’t break the banks of condo associations and force more people out of their places.”

Costs & Criminality

Speaking of condo associations, the Florida Bar Association has convened its own task force to analyze whether there needs to be any new state laws on overseeing those volunteer bodies and how they maintain their buildings.

Florida State Sen. Jason Pizzo, whose district covers Miami Beach, Surfside and much of eastern Miami-Dade County, said he already has some ideas in mind to make condo board decisions more transparent and to make its board members more accountable to charges of corruption and mismanagement. Among other things, Pizzo said board members should be required to receive ethics training, just like regular elected officials.

“The Miami-Dade County Grand Jury has done reports, several reports, on the gross abuses [committed] by condo associations,” Pizzo told the Biscayne Times.

Glazer is hesitant about making board members potentially criminally accountable for mismanagement.

“If you are going to hold board members criminally liable for dumb decisions, nobody would run for the board,” he stated.

What Glazer would like to see is a requirement that board members attend a state-certified association class instead of being able to bow out of it by signing an affidavit swearing to uphold HOA bylaws. He also thinks building officials should be required to recertify buildings every 10 years and that associations be required to fund reserves.

What may also need to happen are formal procedures on providing housing for people evacuated from residential buildings deemed unsafe. In the case of Crestview Towers, so far the largest evacuation after the Champlain Towers South disaster, the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust was able to place most people – many of them parents with children or the elderly – in temporary hotel rooms or in homeless shelters. Miami-Dade County Emergency Management even placed 50 people in the Miami-Dade County Fair & Exposition Center at 10901 SW 24th St.

But Frank Rollason of the county’s emergency management department warned that sheltering people from evacuated apartments and condos isn’t in Miami-Dade’s budget.

“This is not a disaster that will be handled by FEMA,” he explained. “We have had several meetings with the mayor to talk about what involvement or obligation exactly should the county have with this. There is no reimbursement [from the federal government]. It is on the county taxpayers’ dime.”

Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, said he intends to bill the Crestview Towers Condominium Association for the expenses.

“The condo association,” he said, “has the fault and the responsibility.”