Where will they live? Residents of condemned Florida Keys building running out of time
When the tide rises, Andy Osorio said water seeps through the floor of his canal-front apartment in the Florida Keys and soaks into his tiles.
“When you press the tile, water comes out,” Osorio said
The same thing happens in other first-floor apartments at Mariner Place in the Middle Keys city of Marathon, the 57-year-old contractor said.
Now, Osorio and his neighbors have been told they have to leave. The three-story building has been condemned over structural and safety issues.
And there’s hardly anywhere else to go.
The building is among a dwindling stock of housing for Keys workers — hotel room cleaners, convenience store clerks, construction workers — who are the backbone of Monroe County’s tourism industry.
Mariner Place, a concrete and stucco building with 16 units on Coco Plum Drive, once looked modern when it went up in the 1970s. But with what city building officials call a chronic lack of maintenance over the years, the building is falling apart.
Last week, based on an inspection by Miami’s Cueto Engineering that found dangerous structural and electrical issues, city officials told the owners of the building that all residents had to leave by the beginning of March and could not return until the problems were fixed.
The owners, Mariners Place Land Corp., sent a Feb. 16 letter to residents saying the company plans to remodel the building, but gave no timeline on when work would be done. Based on the issues found — major spalling, concrete columns and beams cracking throughout the building, and rusted and corroded electrical circuit boxes — the job could take months, if not a year or more.
This leaves the residents — 14 families that include eight children — possibly homeless for at least a month while they look for a new place to live in the Keys, a string of islands where rents continue to rise and affordable homes for working people are harder and harder to find.
“I have no idea where I’m going to go,” said Elimar Rincon, a 21-year-old woman who lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her mother, who has been out of work since her recent cancer diagnosis.
So far, the only person to offer Rincon and her mother a place to stay is her sister, who lives in Miami-Dade County. But making the four-hour commute to and from Marathon for her gas station job doesn’t make financial sense.
She pays $1,300 in rent for her one-bedroom apartment in a city where average rents for a similar space can run $2,000 a month or more. So, staying in the Keys may not be an option.
“I have nothing. And, even if I do find something new around here, they probably won’t let us move in until April 1,” Rincon said.
Wayne Carter, chief executive officer of the Marathon and Lower Keys Association of Realtors, said that while it’s possible some Mariner Place residents could relocate for about the same amount of money, the reality is that rents throughout the tourist-dependent Keys are increasing.
“Sometimes you can find one for a little less, and if it is very nice and on the water it could be a little more,” Carter said. “This is certainly not a good thing as we already have an affordable housing issue and this will just make it worse. I hope they are able to find housing in a timely manner.”
Surfside prompts action
After last June’s Champlain Towers South condominium collapse in Surfside, which killed 98 people, the city of Marathon, like other coastal Florida municipalities and communities, made inspections a priority. As of February, Mariner Place was the only one in Marathon flagged as being too unsafe to inhabit, said Steven Williams, city attorney and deputy city manager.
“We, along with many other municipalities, adopted an inspection program after Surfside, and this same engineer performed multiple inspections throughout town, and they passed,” Williams told the Miami Herald/FLKeysNews. “This is the only one that failed. And, the communication the city has had with the engineer, [he] is not equivocating in his opinion that this is unsafe and people shouldn’t be living there.”
Before the inspection program, the building had not been inspected since its 1978 construction other than for routine look-overs for permits, said City Manager George Garrett.
Since the inspection, the city and the owners are blaming each other for not helping residents find another place to live while the building undergoes repairs.
“We’re trying to do what we can to help them out. It’s a sad situation,” said Juan Carlos Berdeal Jr., president of Mariners Place Land Corp.
But city leaders blame Berdeal, who has owned the building since 2008, for letting it fall into such a state of disrepair — and they said it’s up to his company to help residents find permanent or temporary homes while repairs are made.
“We’ve been doing what we can to fix it, but the issue is between the owners and the residents,” Williams said.
Garrett said he and his colleagues have met with Berdeal, urging him to do more to relocate the tenants.
“We have been going to the owners to attempt to do the right thing, and the owner is turning around and saying it is our fault,” Garrett said. “The owner is not taking responsibility for this.”
During a meeting between residents and city officials Thursday morning, Garrett, Williams and city building official Noe Martinez said they’d be willing to let residents rent trailers and let them stay for a month on city-owned land while they looked for new homes.
Osorio said his friend in Homestead owns trailers that he would rent the Mariner Place tenants. Williams said the residents would have to pay for the trailers and to connect to use the city’s water and sewer.
“We can’t pay for it, but we can help you get it done,” he told residents at the meeting.
Another option discussed Thursday is finding motel rooms for the tenants until they find new homes. They would have to pay for them, and finding vacant rooms during the busy winter tourist season is unlikely.
In an interview with the Miami Herald/FLKeysNews, Carter said the Marathon and Lower Keys Association of Realtors is also willing to help tenants find new homes, and urged them to contact his office.
“Anything we can do to help we will,” he said. “We really do care.”
Although rent is relatively inexpensive for the Keys at Mariner Place, the building is not categorized as low-income or subsidized housing.
“It’s a shame what’s happening to these people. These people, they’re not government-dependent. They’re not living in subsidized housing. We get zero calls in these apartments,” said Willie Guerra, a veteran Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputy. “They’re all linked to the community. They’re housekeepers, trash collectors, electricians. Everyone who pitches in to the city. They do the work like cleaning hotel rooms and garbage collection. They’re all linked to the city. Everyone who lives there pitches in.”
Paying out of their own pockets
No matter how much they want to stay, tenants say the conditions inside Mariner Place have been less than ideal for years. They say the owners didn’t keep up with maintenance.
Rincon, one of the residents, told the story of new tenants Leo Noa and Yanexis Ramirez, who just moved into their unit in January. Right away, Noa said his electric panel was sparking. Rather than wait for the owners to fix it, he ended up doing the repair work himself, Rincon said.
“The owner didn’t do anything,” Rincon said.
Other tenants said they’ve paid thousands of dollars out of their own pockets to make their homes livable.
That’s why Karen Ortega, a Keys property manager who has been advocating for the tenants since hearing about their situation, is irked by the language in the owners’ letter last week. Specifically, she took issue with the statement that management would return all security deposits in full “as long as everything is normal in your unit.”
“Which, to me, that was a slap in the face. Even when Irma came, they never did anything with the units. The water went all the way up the walls, and they only changed about two feet of sheet rock,” Ortega said. “They’re irresponsible. They’re not willing to help anyone.”
Berdeal denied not repairing problems in units reported by residents, including when the building was flooded by Irma in 2017, and again, blamed the city for not helping residents of his building.
“It’s pretty much out of our hands. They’re not doing anything,” he said.
Conditions of Keys buildings
Following Surfside, other municipalities in the Keys, as well as the Monroe County government, began taking a look at their buildings. So far, no buildings in unincorporated Monroe have been deemed unsafe to live in, said Assistant Building Inspector Rey Ortiz.
In Key West, the only other major city in the Keys, officials found troubling safety issues at the 111-unit Santa Clara condominium building in the Old Town section after an inspection in September. However, officials did not condemn the building and gave the condo association a strict timeline to conduct the needed repairs.
“They have hired a contractor and are getting permits,” said city spokeswoman Alyson Crean. “No one had to be relocated.”
Martinez, the Marathon building official who made the call that Mariner Place be evacuated after reading the inspection report from Cueto Engineering earlier this month, said that he’s had to make similar decisions working in other municipalities, which he called “the most horrendous part of his job.”
“No matter where it is, it feels the same,” he told the tenants. “I’m displacing people from their homes.”
Williams countered, however, that the consequences of not evacuating the building could be far worse for the tenants.
“The most horrendous part is if the building falls,” he said, “and you’re pulling bodies out of the rubble.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 12:40 PM.
