he European Space Agency conference<\/a> in June and he hopes to publish more detailed findings within the year.<\/p>\nDifferential settlement can lead to major structural issues ranging from cracked pipes and facades, misaligned doors, twisted rebar, warped floors, or driveways that are a step higher than the lobby. While these issues can be addressed, the costs can be incredibly high, and under Florida law, developers are only on the hook for anything identified within the first seven years after a building is handed over to the homeowners association.<\/p>\n
The Herald reached out to all buildings cited in the original study. All declined to comment. The city of Sunny Isles Beach, where many of the buildings were located, said in 2025 it had received no reports of damages associated with settling.<\/p>\n
However, experts have cautioned that this unexpected, differential settlement needs to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis aspect is not understood well, so we need to look at the geology more carefully and make new models of the subsurface and how it is going to settle,\u201d Anil Misra, chair of the civil and environmental engineering department at Florida International University, said of the new research.<\/p>\n
Since the University of Miami first released its findings over the unexpected settlement of Miami\u2019s skyline, independent experts have called for more research into the subsurface, how to best guarantee the long-term structural integrity of buildings, and monitoring of all buildings that goes beyond the construction period. In a paper published earlier this year, the former dean of the University of Miami\u2019s school of engineering, Jean-Pierre Bardet, called for a \u201ctemporary approval moratorium on slender high-rise towers,\u201d and \u201ca reconsideration of the current high-rise permitting and oversight process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials, developers and their architects and engineers have either declined to comment or questioned the researchers\u2019 motives while assuring the public that the buildings are safe. In the deadly 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside, investigators and other experts made clear that settlement did not play a role.<\/p>\n
A $4-million complaint over structural cracks<\/p>\n
Two-story motels used to dominate places like Sunny Isles Beach, where the subsurface consists of a mix of sand, silt, a little peat and porous limestone, but a building boom beginning in the 2000s saw ever larger towers.<\/p>\n
A Herald investigation has shown that engineers quickly realized that these heavy high-rises experienced more settlement than they had accounted for. In hopes of stabilizing future buildings, they began recommending ever deeper foundations.<\/p>\n
Developers of the Bentley even decided to shave about three floors off to make it lighter, according to the latest geotechnical report the Herald has reviewed. For the remaining 716 feet, engineers recommended foundations reaching down 200 feet \u2014 even deeper than those of the world\u2019s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is four times higher than the Bentley.<\/p>\n
UM\u2019s initial research also suggested that new construction \u2014 and the drilling of foundations \u2014 could cause neighboring buildings to settle. Just like shaking a tin of ground coffee creates more space on top, they argued, the vibration from drilling into the subsurface could compress and compact sand grains.<\/p>\n
The Herald has found that a complaint involving the Millennium Tower and the neighboring Porsche Design Tower supports that theory. In 2016, the Millennium\u2019s HOA filed a complaint over cracks in unit ceilings, the marble floor in the lobby, the swimming pool tiles and the deck, and \u201cstructural cracks in the garage, front entrance and building columns,\u201d citing the construction of the Porsche as the reason. The Millennium sued over close to $4 million in repairs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese structural issues seem to be very significant,\u201d said Bardet, who reviewed the court documents at the Herald\u2019s request.<\/p>\n
That complaint was settled for an undisclosed figure, in large part because the Porsche didn\u2019t violate the building code, which defines the maximum vibration allowed during construction.<\/p>\n
A few years later, in 2024, when construction of the 60-floor St. Regis began, the HOA of the neighboring Marenas Beach Resort became so worried over the vibration that they installed a $20,000, wireless sensor system that tracks minute changes within the building. That doesn\u2019t just ease the minds of residents, the HOA president told the Herald, but equips them with data that could be used in potential litigation.<\/p>\n
The company that installed the sensors, SmartCore, told the Herald that the Marenas was its first client, but that since UM\u2019s study and the Herald\u2019s investigation, five additional high-rises in Miami-Dade have installed SmartCore sensors. Another six are scheduled to be online by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
Independent experts have also called for amending building codes to require long-term monitoring of settlement. Though the official response has been muted, Bardet wrote that in doing so, \u201cpolicymakers can ensure that Miami\u2019s vertical growth is anchored by a foundation as robust as its ambition while the equity of unit owners is protected.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Porsche Design Tower Miami. Porsche Design Tower Miami. New research shows that luxury high-rises in Miami-Dade aren\u2019t just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124],"class_list":["post-431886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}