How many of these Condos were built with money from the Cocaine Cowboys

[malaise]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Cowboys[link:http://|

The number of fatalities from this building collapse in Miami is going to be bad and it will take time to retrieve the bodies.

[BannonsLiver]

1. Here comes the theories.

[malaise]

4. Theories?

Questions
I merely asked about the money source since we all know that drug money was laundered via real estate. The Miami Herald and other sources have quite a bit on the drug money and the real estate boom in Miami.

[XanaDUer2]

5. Yes, drug money fueled Miami

in the 70s and, especially, the 80s.

[Butterflylady]

34. Built in 1981.

[marble falls]

29. So cut to the chase: tell us what it was.

[Earth-shine]

2. Cocaine Cowboys by Jan Hammer

It's meant to be a Miami Vice redux.

[malaise]

7. Thanks

[XanaDUer2]

3. Sad one is dead

I'm familiar with that area. Those hotels and buildings make what we call condo canyon on Collins. They didn't want peons on the "private" beaches for each building. Totally over built area ruined the natural area and vieW.

thanks for posting!

[malaise]

6. One?

This is going to be bad - twelve storey building pancaked - I hope the snowbirds headed home already but many people are missing and some of the injured are critical.

[XanaDUer2]

10. One

Reported so far. Sure it'll be more. Watching the news now

[KY_EnviroGuy]

18. Don't many snowbirds lease their places out to vacationers in summer?

That's what I recall about many places on the Grand Strand in South Carolina during my year or so there. They would put their condos or houses in the hands of a local realtor that would do the renting and handled all the nasty rental details for a considerable fee.

If that's the case, it may prove difficult to determine exactly who was in the building last night.

KY......

[malaise]

22. Yes because one man said his friends from Argentina are missing and

they were there on vacation (to get vaccines).

DeathSentence just suggested that there will be some very bad news

[dawg day]

32. And in the middle of the night....

Everyone in bed.

[malaise]

35. They had no chance

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215557467#post9

[JHB]

45. About 50 reported missing, if I remember correctly from this morning.

We can hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

On edit: WaPo just sent news alert: 99 people unaccounted for.

[malaise]

46. Frightening

[superpatriotman]

8. All of them

They still are though Russian money is everywhere now, too.

[malaise]

39. Truth be told the corrupt don't give a shit about us peons

We're on our own. There will be very few people alive in that rubble. My only hope is that they died before they woke up.

[machoneman]

9. Building finished 1 year before new regulations on safety checks.

They could have rushed the foundation, cheated on the approved design, used faulty or no steel, poured low slump (weak) concrete, ocean tunneling over time, ground collapse due to limestone cavern action......and more.

[Amishman]

11. I posted this in another thread, but lack of maintenance seems to be the most likely candidate

Last edited Fri Jun 25, 2021, 05:51 AM - Edit history (2)

My first thought is lack of maintenance

It has been reported that they were doing roof work on the building.

Looking at aerial photos the roof was in extremely poor shape. I imagine maintenance was neglected for a while.

Construction appears to have been reinforced concrete. I can see a scenario where 'normal' cracking of concrete allows moisture intrusion to reach the rebar, possibly some salt from the nearby ocean as well. rebar corrodes. rusting iron expands, which would crack the surrounding concrete further. The additional cracking allows salt/moisture to reach new rebar - which rusts, expands, and cracks more concrete. This dominos and you end up with large areas with 'rotten' concrete and rebar.

Proper inspection and maintenance would seal these cracks and stop moisture intrusion before this can occur.

Take this scenario of degraded structural integrity and add to it the modest added load of the equipment and roofing materials for the current work.

edit: looking upwards from Google street view on the 88th street side of the building, you can see numerous spots of concrete spalling on the underside of the balconies. This is from the iron of the balcony railings embedded in the concrete rusting, expanding, and cracking apart the surrounding concrete.

Edit2: construction is post tensioned concrete. So steel cable under immense tension instead of rebar. A tensioned cable rusting to failure would cause a huge loss of structural strength over a large area.

[Wounded Bear]

12. Supposedly there was a building inspector on the roof the day before...

according to one of the intervewees on MSNBC.

[malaise]

15. The 40 year

inspection was coming up

[malaise]

20. Thanks man

Love input from you experts

[Amishman]

25. I wouldn't call myself an expect

I just have a very analytical mind and tend to research questions that pop into my head.

thank you for the compliment though

[malaise]

26. LOL

Everything is relative

[malaise]

13. The Mayor got me thinking

Thanks for this

[sop]

14. I suspect the collapse was caused by a sinkhole, probably the result of rising sea levels making

all these barrier islands unstable.

[Wounded Bear]

16. Virtually the whole peninsula is a potential sinkhole...

given the geology. Add in how they're draining the aquifers and overbuilding.

[malaise]

17. Same shit here

Banning plastic bags while draining the aquifers and building more hotels on the coast.
Crazy does not describe these morons

[Wounded Bear]

19. Money talks...nt

[malaise]

21. DeathSentence on now n/t

[XanaDUer2]

30. it's 7-11 feet above sea level

and horribly over built. Miami will be affected by climate change more quickly, imo, then some other areas. I'm from there and it's sad .

The everglades is a rare ecosystem, and it's being destroyed.

[Towlie]

28. No, it was probably galvanic corrosion of the reinforcing steel in the building's concrete.

 
←

[Wounded Bear]

31. Sea air is hella corrosive to most types of steel/iron...

if they used cheap rebar in the original construction...

[sop]

33. I lived in a waterfront condo on Brickell where all the balconies facing Biscayne Bay, supported

by cantilevered concrete slabs reinforced with rebar, began suffering from the effects of exposure to the corrosive salt air environment. Stains began to appear on the exterior surfaces of the concrete, then chunks started to fall off as the steel inside deteriorated.

After a few years of watching the building fall apart, the condo association voted to hire an engineer to assess the situation. We were told the expense of rebuilding the balconies would be astronomical, and none of the residents wanted the special assessments such repairs would cost. The decision was made to ignore the problem and simply make temporary cosmetic repairs, like repainting and replastering.

Before the county's 40-year building re-certification inspection was to be performed, and we would be inevitably be ordered to correct these structural problems, many of the residents began selling their units before being required to make prospective buyers aware of the problem. Many residents sold at a loss due to the economic downturn at that time.

A few years later, after the county's re-certification inspection process had uncovered the structural problems, and ordered the needed extensive and expensive repairs, the association instead voted to sell the land to developers who wanted to tear down the existing eleven-storey building and put up a much taller structure. Since the condo was situated on a large waterfront lot along exclusive Brickell Road, we all received very good offers for individual units from the developer.

All these older condo buildings along the coast will eventually have to be torn down. Taller, much more expensive structures will replace them. That's been the history of Miami-Dade county for decades. It won't change till the rising sea levels wash the whole area away.

[moonscape]

47. Curious: Did you get a better deal from the

developer than those who bailed before the truth was told?

Hope so!

[sop]

48. Everyone got much higher offers from the development company that purchased the property.

Last edited Thu Jun 24, 2021, 11:13 PM - Edit history (1)

Sale prices for units sold individually before that were significantly lower, probably due to the depressed real estate market at the time, and the age and condition of the building. Then, after the structural problems were officially documented by the county's 40-year re-certification inspection, and individual sellers were obligated to disclose known defects, no one would buy units in that building because of future special assessments.

After the management company found a potential buyer, requiring at least 90% of the residents to approve the sale of the building, the developers made individual offers for each of the 60 units, depending on the square footage and location of each unit. The offers were often twice market value at the time.

Built in 1970, the old building's footprint was very small for the size of the lot, and the majority of the land was devoted to a large outside parking lot and amenities. The new building was designed to be much taller, with indoor parking on the first three floors, a pool on the roof and taking up the entire property.

They aren't making waterfront land any longer in Miami, so I'm sure the developer made a pile of money from the sale of hundreds of new high dollar units.

[moonscape]

49. Putting modernity aside, I surely would have preferred

living with the smaller footprint.

I’ve not spent a lot of time in FL, but we used to vacation there from NC when I was a kid. Hadn’t been there in many decades, so when I was back in NC Mom and I took off for a 6-wk FL vacation, down the gulf side to Naples and up the Atlantic. It surely had changed, well duh in 50 years.

We were looking for a place to stay on Lido Key and everything was sterile highrises, not the simple 50’s motels of my youth that remained my Florida frozen-in-time image. Then to our delight, at the end of the Key was a Hemsley place that had retained that footprint: one level, open your motel slider and stick your toes directly in the sand. So nostalgic!

Glad it worked out for you financially, that you didn’t get burned as some others did.

[UpInArms]

23. Things that make you go .... Hmmmmm

The film reveals that much of the economic growth which took place in Miami during this period was a benefit of the drug trade. As members of the drug trade made immense amounts of money, this money flowed in large amounts into legitimate businesses. Consequently, drug money indirectly financed the construction of many of the modern high-rise buildings in southern Florida. Later, when law enforcement pressure drove many major players out of the picture, numerous high-end stores and businesses closed because of plummeting sales.

[malaise]

27. Precisely

It's why we have to ask questions

[sop]

38. The drug dealers weren't building these condos, they were just laundering their cash through a

series of corrupt local banks and making huge deposits. The greedy bankers in turn began making large building loans available to shady local developers with little to no construction experience. Miami-Dade building inspectors were paid off to turn a blind eye to all the shoddy condominiums going up everywhere along the coast. Then all kinds of sketchy foreign and out of town buyers began snapping up the overpriced units, driving up the price of real estate for everyone else.

The South Florida economy has been dependent on all this condominium construction for decades. It's been one boom-and-bust cycle after another, fueled by this insanity. Eventually the rising sea levels will engulf the entire area, making it uninhabitable. Or a massive hurricane will come along and wash everything off these unstable barrier islands. In the end, we'll all have to cover these losses due to higher insurance rates and increased property taxes.

[UpInArms]

40. The "boom" before the S&L bust

Here’s a walk through memory lane

S&L; BAILOUT BENEFITED JEB BUSH LOAN TO HIM, PARTNER MOSTLY REPAID BY U.S.

[malaise]

43. Thanks for this

Any word from Jeb?

[XanaDUer2]

41. Wonderful summation

Miami very corrupt. A beautiful area ruined by over building.

[malaise]

42. Nailed it

and now 53 people have been accounted for and 99 are missing.
The chickens have come home to roost

[Towlie]

24. For reference, here's a Google Street View of the building that collapsed.

 
←

Google Street View from the beach, taken in 2013

Compare this to the news photos to see how much of the building was lost.

[malaise]

36. Watch this

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215557467#post9

[Blue Owl]

44. Wonder if the Coke Cowboys are legally responsible/liable for their collapsing crack stacks?

I suppose they'll have to officially declare the cause -- if it was a sinkhole, or just cheap construction...