Two and a half years before her building collapsed into a pile of rubble, Champlain Towers South resident Mara Chouela dashed off the latest in a string of angry complaints about the development project next door.
« We are concerned that the construction next to Surfside is too close, » Chouela, a board member of the condo association, wrote in a January 2019 email to a building official in her Florida town. Workers were « digging too close to our property and we have concerns regarding the structure of our building, » she wrote, attaching photos of construction equipment directly across from her building’s property wall. Just 28 minutes later, the official, Rosendo Prieto, responded that « there is nothing for me to check. » The reason why: The offending development, an ultra-luxury tower known as Eighty Seven Park, was directly across the border separating the town of Surfside from the city of Miami Beach, which runs between the two buildings. In the wake of the Champlain Towers South disaster, Eighty Seven Park is facing new scrutiny: Champlain residents had complained that construction on the neighboring building would regularly cause their units to shake, according to friends and family members of the condo owners, as well as emails released by the town. There’s no evidence that the construction of Eighty Seven Park, which took place between 2016 and 2019, contributed to the collapse. « We are confident that the construction of 87 Park did not cause or contribute to the collapse that took place in Surfside, » the development group behind Eighty Seven Park said in a statement to CNN Tuesday. But the 18-story tower would not have been allowed to be built across the border in Surfside, where buildings are subject to a 12-story height limit (although Champlain Towers itself received an exemption in the 1980s to add nine extra feet, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday). That height limit doesn’t apply in Miami Beach. The new tower looms over its now-ruined neighbor, its sleek, glass curves contrasting with the workmanlike stucco and concrete balconies of the section of Champlain South that’s still standing. Magaly « Maggie » Ramsey told CNN her mother Magaly Delgado, who is among the unaccounted for Champlain residents, had been concerned about the work being done next door. « She did complain of a lot of tremors and things that were being done to the other building that she sometimes was concerned what may be happening to her building — that might be putting it at risk, » Ramsey said. The new tower was designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano — and billed as the starchitect’s « first residential project in the Western Hemisphere. » Its units are selling for millions of dollars, far more than most of those in Champlain South, and an outlier in what has historically been a more middle-class neighborhood of Miami Beach.
