Post-Surfside collapse scrutiny already shuts down one building. What else is out there? | Editorial

Behind the upscale, beachfront facade of the Champlain Tower South Condo, hid a problem — one that investigators could take years to find — a ticking time bomb that went off when the building collapsed on June 24.

Forty-eight hours after the Champlain Tower South Condo came crumbling down, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava ordered an audit of buildings of at least five stories that are due for their county-mandated 40-year recertification but haven’t received them. Some cities, including Miami and Sunny Isles, have taken similar steps.

“In an abundance of caution,” North Miami Beach on Friday ordered a 156-unit building be immediately closed and evacuated after an inspection found it to have unsafe structural and electrical conditions. The county also notified a Northeast Miami-Dade building that four balconies had to be “immediately closed” because of safety concerns, Levine Cava told reporters on Tuesday.

What other structural and maintenance issues are hiding behind facades that might look as “nice” as the Champlain Tower? Just asking that question might scare many building dwellers who just over a week ago never gave this issue a second thought.

The county has found there are 24 apartment or condominium buildings facing unsafe-structure violations for not securing their certification, the Herald’s Doug Hanks reported. That doesn’t mean they have structural damage such as the one reported at the Champlain in 2018 or that anyone’s lives are in danger. One building owned by the county was found “structurally safe” during a 2015 inspection but was was cited for overdue parking-lot lighting improvements.

Still, this shows that the systems we have in place to make sure condos are safe aren’t foolproof. As the Herald Editorial Board has previously said, the 40-year recertification time frame needs to be re-evaluated.

Issues with recertification

Buildings that go through the recertification process and fail must appear before the county’s Unsafe Structures Board (some municipalities have their own boards).

Here’s what often happens then, County Commissioner Raquel Regalado told the Herald Editorial Board.

“Usually, unsafe structure boards don’t want to go to that step and tell people to evacuate, but this collapse has already changed that,” she said.

We bet — and hope — she’s right.

Another problem Regalado pointed out is that it can take condo associations between four to six years to complete recertification (the Champlain had actually started the process early and was still going through it). That’s the time it might take for the county to send a notice, the association to hire an engineer or architect and have meetings with condo owners, who might push back on the costs associated with the repairs.

Regalado said she will look into whether the county can send those notices sooner. She also wants to consider adding seawalls to the certification process, which currently looks at structural conditions and electrical systems.

Not all buildings are high rises

While the focus since the collapse has understandably been on high-rises, many of Miami-Dade’s buildings are smaller and didn’t meet the criteria of the audit Levine Cava and the city of Miami, for example, requested. The city ordered inspections of structures six stories or higher.

But many smaller multi-family dwellings are in the areas where Black and low-income people live, as in parts of Little Havana.

“They have to expand that [audit] to mid-rise buildings because many of the buildings within the urban core are at least two to four stories, especially in Overtown and Liberty City,” Daniella Pierre, president of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP, told the Editorial Board.

Sometimes these apartments are in squalid conditions that go unaddressed by absentee or greedy landlords who know residents have nowhere else to go. What happens when tenants complain? They are faced with threats and intimidation, and sometimes even eviction notices, Pierre said.

Inspecting all these buildings would be a huge undertaking. But they cannot be forgotten. It was only three years ago that a Herald investigation found that a taxpayer-funded $24 million shoddy repair project at Glorieta Gardens, an apartment complex in Opa-locka, left residents in a worse situation that they were in before with moldy, dilapidated apartments.

The reality is that while many buildings might not be on the verge of collapsing, they still endanger Miamians’ health with poor maintenance and toxic mold.

This story was originally published July 4, 2021 at 6:08 AM.