No, Climate Change Is NOT Causing Miami’s High-Rises To Sink.  Quit With This Bullshit Narrative.

by Josh Colletta
Downtown Miami and the Port Blvd. Bridge at night, viewed from the MacArthur Causeway. Photo by Eric Christian King on Unsplash

Two Miami-related posts back to back?

Yep.

It’s where I was born and raised.  It’s a place I still love.  It’s a place I’m quite knowledgeable about.  And if it makes the news (which happens often), that’s an excuse for me to talk about it.  Especially when the news gets it wrong.

Which is the case here.

Articles are popping up left and right (have a few more for good measure) over the past couple of weeks proclaiming that the rising sea levels caused by climate change — which are, in fact, real phenomena that are happening — are causing the skyscrapers along South Florida’s coastline to sink.

This is incorrect, and anyone who actually knows anything about it has already figured that out.

Here’s the deal.  A study led by the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science used some fancy-schmancy satellite-based radar technology to measure the surface height of certain building features from 2016 to 2023.  Changes in the vertical height of these features over time indicated “surface displacement,” which in this case means they’re sinking into the ground.

It’s worth noting that the 35 high-rises this study tracked are all located in Dade County, from Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach, a strip of land that was already seeing the construction of skyscrapers when I was a kid.  I could see the Sunny Isles skyline, both under construction and completed, from my front yard in North Miami Beach in the early 90’s.  The construction has continued ever since, and the buildings have only gotten taller in that time.  In fact, about half of the measured buildings were built within the last decade, and roughly 70% of the buildings that are sinking are located in Sunny Isles.  That’s not a coincidence.

Now, it is absolutely incredible to me that even a right-wing rag like The Washington Examiner included a paragraph linking this to climate change in their article:

Miami faces a few unique challenges, mainly land subsidence and rising sea levels as a result of climate change, which makes the city vulnerable to coastal flooding and erosion.  Land subsidence is further aggravated by severe flooding caused by rising sea levels.  The sea level is rising at a rate of roughly 2.6 inches per decade when averaged over the past 30 years.

Interestingly, the Fox Business piece correctly did not mention climate change.  Which is correct because… hey, guess what!  Neither did the study’s authors, themselves!

In fact, the UM article published on the school’s web site specifically states what the likely causes are:

Miami’s subsurface is composed of limestone interspersed with layers of sand.  The researchers suggest that much of the observed subsidence—where the ground sinks or settles—stems from the shifting of grains in the sandy layers, a process triggered by the weight of the high-rise buildings and the vibrations caused during foundation construction.  In addition, the researchers propose that the ongoing subsidence may also be influenced by daily tidal flows and the cracking of limestone beneath the surface.  While builders make efforts to minimize construction vibrations, these factors contribute to a gradual, continuous sinking of the land over time.

And here’s how I knew that was the case before I even looked at the study.

In an urban setting with several mid- and high-rises nearby, a tall, 28-floor tower in the Neo-Classical style stands on a raised, broad, square base with steps leading up to the entryways from street level on each side. Counting the uniformly-spaced windows for width, the first 4 floors have 11 windows across all sides. The next 3 floors are 9 windows across with each corner set back a square space inward. The next 12 floors are 5 windows across. The 4 floors above them are the same width, but the corners have been cut off at a 45 degree angle for a single window space each, and two smaller windows occupy those spaces on each corner. The next 2 floors are of the same shape as below, but are slightly smaller. The pyramidal roof sits above that, housing the final 3 stories. It's actually a ziggurat-style structure comprised of 13 stepped vertical levels of increasingly smaller octagons, every four roughly being the height of one floor, matching the shape of the tower up to the cupola. It's tinted a drab grayish green. The base is sheathed in Stone Mountain granite, while the rest of the building is covered with terra cotta that is been tinted to match the color of the granite below.

Photo by Marc Averette via Wikimedia Commons. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en) with no modifications.
Photo by Marc Averette via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the Miami-Dade County Courthouse, a building that, thanks to my parents’ divorce when I was nine years old, I’ve spent more time in than I’d care to be able to say I have.  (Don’t fret, though: their divorce, while acrimonious, was very much a good thing for both of them.)

Even before the divorce, I’d visited the building several times on school field trips, especially on historical Downtown Miami walking tours.  Miamian kids like myself — at least those of us who were interested and paying attention — are well-versed in some of the more obscure facts about various landmarks across South Florida, and my brain latched onto one about the courthouse in particular.

Designed by A. Ten Eyck Brown in the early 1920s, the 28-story, 361-foot tower was originally intended to be the Atlanta City Hall, but Brown’s proposal lost out.  So he offered it to Dade County, who quickly took him up on it.  Construction began in 1925, but once the structure reached the tenth story, everything came to a screeching halt.  The reason for the shutdown?  You guessed it: Frank Stallone.

No, of course I’m kidding.

It was sinking.  The pilings had not been sunk deep enough to support the building.  A consulting architect from Mexico City who had dealt with a similar issue had to be brought in to assess the situation and devise a solution, which included additional supports and filling the basement with three feet of cement.

See, the geology of the Florida Peninsula really isn’t all that complex.  This illustration from the South Florida Water Management District helps demonstrate the point.

A cutaway illustration showing streets, buildings, and waterways sitting atop surface sands, the surficial aquifer below that, a confining layer of clay underneath, and the Floridian aquifer below that.

In the middle of the peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, at the highest points, you have about 100 feet of surface soil and porous limestone before you hit the surficial aquifer, which in most of South and Southwest Florida’s case is the Biscayne Aquifer.  That’s about another 200 feet deep, and at 300 feet below the surface, you hit the clay confining layer.  1,000 feet below the surface is the Floridian Aquifer system, which itself is about 1,000 feet deep before you hit the bedrock of the Florida Platform.

Now, that’s in the middle of the peninsula.  The closer you get to the shoreline, and the more narrow the landmass is, the thinner those layers become.  The peninsula is about 160 miles from coast to coast at its widest point, but it’s only about 90 miles wide at Miami’s latitude.

On nearly the entirety of Florida’s east coast, there is no point at which urban or metropolitan development reaches any more than 20 miles inland, and the lone exception, Jacksonville’s sprawl, reaches about 30 miles inland.  Orlando’s development extends about 70 miles inland, but there are no skyscrapers built, planned, or even proposed in that area.  The current tallest approved or proposed tower in Orlando or Daytona Beach is just a little bit taller than the tallest existing high-rise at 467 feet and 41 floors.  So that metro doesn’t even factor into this discussion.

And, in fact, the reason why the Rosenstiel School study chose the section of barrier islands in Miami-Dade County is because the cities of Miami Beach and Sunny Isles Beach are the locations of the state’s greatest concentration and tallest of barrier island high-rises and skyscrapers.  In fact, you might think that Miami Beach has the tallest towers outside of the City of Miami proper, but you’d be wrong.  Miami Beach’s tallest building is the 519-foot 48-story Five Park, completed just this past November.  Sunny Isles Beach’s tallest are the twin 672-foot 52-story towers of Estates at Acqualina.  Surfside and Bal Harbour, which separate the other two cities, are mostly made up of high-rises rather than skyscrapers, but are very much in the mix here due to the infamous, deadly 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South.  Which, despite not being caused by subsidence, occurred during the time frame that the study examined.

Multiple beachfront skyscrapers, viewed from the inland side, reflect the warm colors of a sunset up against a darkening eastern sky with patchy clouds. Photo by Jimmy Baikovicius via Wikimedia Commons, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en) without modification.
An evening view of a portion of the Sunny Isles Beach skyline from the west in 2018, including the skyscrapers of Jade Signature, Jade Beach, Jade Ocean, Muse, Ocean 4, and Chateau Beach.  Photo by Jimmy Baikovicius via Wikimedia Commons.

For comparison, the tallest in the City of Miami and all of Florida is, as of 2017, the 869-foot 85-story Panorama Tower in the Brickell neighborhood.  But in 2027, it will be surpassed by Downtown’s 1,049-foot 100-story Waldorf Astoria Miami, which is expected to be joined a year later by the proposed Miami Riverbridge Tower 1, a 1,049-foot 95-story replacement for the existing Hyatt Regency Hotel and James L. Knight Center (a convention and performing arts hall), also in Downtown.

They might have also included Hallandale Beach and southern Hollywood if they wanted to, which are home to a concentration of several more tall towers like 2000 Ocean, the three Beach Club towers and the neighboring Lyfe complex, the sister Hyde Beach House across the street, the world-famous Diplomat Resort, and yes, I’ll even mention the less-respected (which I know just burns him up inside) Trump Hollywood.

Against a night sky with a single-family residential neighborhood in the foreground, a cluster of high-rise and short skyscrapers form a skyline in the middle distance.
A western nighttime view of the combined skylines of Hallandale Beach and Hollywood Beach by Flickr user Urban Florida Photographer.

So given what we know about the construction of the Miami-Dade County Courthouse, and given what we know about the geology of the Florida Peninsula, and given that the skyscrapers in South Florida just keep getting taller and taller…

What the fuck did anyone think was going to be the result here? Of COURSE the damn things were going to start sinking! It’s not just that they’re getting taller, it’s that they’re getting closer together, as well.  Remember what the UM article said?

In addition, the researchers propose that the ongoing subsidence may also be influenced by daily tidal flows and the cracking of limestone beneath the surface.

Emphasis mine.  The cracking of the limestone isn’t just happening because the buildings are getting bigger, it’s because they’re all being built in a straight line, one right next to the other, for miles up and down the coast!

And the tidal flow?  That’s just a normal natural force that would be happening whether sea levels were rising or not.  Erosion is simply a fact of geology on this planet, especially in Florida.

Plus. you have to factor in the erosion of the karst limestone.  We’re not just talking about the removal of beach sand here.  Sea walls can be put up and sand can be replaced.  We’re also talking about the dissolution of the thin surface layer that everything is built on by the rainwater and groundwater seeping into the Biscayne Aquifer below it, along with the flow of the aquifer itself.

Why do you think sinkholes form in Florida?  It’s not Mother Nature poking her finger into the planet for shits and giggles.  It’s literally the limestone eroding away, especially in the middle of the state when the groundwater has drained out.  Florida is literally breaking up underneath itself.  That’s what’s going on here, that’s what’s always been going on here, and that’s what will continue to go on here no matter how the climate changes, because that’s just what happens when limestone contacts water.

The only difference now is the Manhattanization of South Florida.  It was just starting in the 90’s when I was a kid, but it exploded around 2000, paused during the Great Recession, then picked right back up again during the recovery.  There are more tall buildings in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties today than I ever imagined there would be.  Even in places where I never imagined there would ever be tall buildings!  Places like Coconut Grove, downtown Coral Gables, and even Kendall’s Dadeland neighborhood.  I mentioned on Friday how Dadeland Mall was basically the bigger, South Dade answer to the 163rd Street Mall, but I don’t think even its developers could have foreseen an edge city springing up around it.

A tightly-clustered skyline of tan and beige-colored high-rises, each with many windows reflecting the bright, clear blue sky.  In the foreground, palm trees line a bus-only roadway.
The Downtown Dadeland skyline as seen from the South Dade Busway.  Picture by Wikimedia user B137.

Basically, we can look at the cause and effect here through the metaphor of driving a bunch of ever-larger pickup trucks onto the ever-thinning ice of a frozen lake.  Sooner, not later, sum’n’s gotta give.

So why, then, are the corporate media, even right-wing outlets, blaming climate change?

Knowing how they think, my hunch is this: if they can successfully paint the study as blaming climate change (which, again, it doesn’t), then you’ve got two immediate barriers to any regulation that would raise the costs of building these things.  On the one hand, those who acknowledge climate change will throw their hands up and say “well, that’s that, then.  We can’t stop it, and the denialists will prevent us from mitigating the effects.”  And on the other hand, they’ll have been correct about the denialists, who will simply say “climate change isn’t real, and we’re not going to regulate anything having to do with it.”

Notably, Florida governor, hilariously failed presidential candidate, and noted Guantanamo Bay torture lawyer Ron “Puddin’ Fingers” DeSantis is firmly on the denialist side.  Though he’ll certainly take the time for a photo op in the aftermath of the hurricanes that are more powerful than they’ve ever been at the sizes they’re now reaching.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shakes hands with local law enforcement and tours a Southwest Florida neighborhood while wearing a pair of solid white, knee-high waterproof boots with the legs of his blue jeans tucked into them despite there being no standing water anywhere nearby and nobody else wearing around him anything of the sort.
He also happens to be a go-go boot aficionado, as he revealed to us in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.  Photos from Florida Politics.

So by successfully — falsely — painting this as a climate change issue, the people with the money are basically helping out their buddies with money who want to keep building and selling.  No new regulations means no new expenses, and that means no hits to the profit margins… at least not for that reason.  They’ll make bank, then get out after the checks clear and before a 70-story monstrosity tips over into the Atlantic like something out of a disaster movie (oh, trust me: it’s coming).  And if someone comes for them with civil action for the catastrophe?  “Sorry, climate change.  Couldn’t do anything about it.”

Ironically, even though the Surfside collapse had nothing to do with the building sinking, it did have everything to do with intentionally cheap and shoddy construction, lack of maintenance, and the relevant officials being bribed to look the other way.  That thing was built in 1981.  The Dade County governments — both city and county levels — have been notoriously corrupt throughout history, but especially so during the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, during which the drug money was flowing faster than water through a fire hose.  And it’s not just me guessing about at that, though it was my first thought when the news broke.  No, that’s the expert consensus; as Wikipedia notes:

Corruption during construction has been cited by multiple local media sources as a potential contributing cause of the collapse.[13][14][15]

Which is to say that if you don’t think these people are willing to stoop so low as to blame climate change just to cut a few corners, rethink that opinion, because it’s wrong.

Which is to further say to the news outlets that claim to be reporting based on the facts: quit repeating the lie that the sinking South Florida skyscrapers have anything to do with climate change, and even if your corporate masters threaten to fire the whole lot of you, report the truth anyway.

If you continue to perpetuate the bullshit, you will bear partial responsibility for the inevitable deaths that will come later.  That’s not hyperbole, that’s not exaggeration, that is fact.  You are letting them get away with it, and blood will be on your hands.

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