Miami Beach Building Collapse: Did Climate Change Help Cause It? - Rolling Stone

South Florida’s real estate is only going to get more deadly if we continue to ignore all the warning signs of a doomed coastline

Before it fell, Champlain Towers South, the 12-story Florida condo building that collapsed last week in the middle of the night, burying residents in a pile of concrete and chaos, was just another nondescript high-rise on the beach. It had been thrown up quickly during the go-go years of the 1980s, when the deregulation of the savings and loan industry sparked a red-hot building boom in Miami. Forty years later, it was showing its age, not just in its clunky, vaguely Soviet design, but in the faded, weather-beaten look that old concrete structures get after they have been too long exposed to salty water and wind.

I know this because I used to walk by it every day. A few years ago, when I was in Miami researching and reporting The Water Will Come, a book about the risks and consequences of sea level rise, I rented a room in a house not far from Surfside, a quiet community just north of the city of Miami Beach. To clear my head, I often walked on the beach in front of Champlain Towers South. I never gave the building much thought, beyond what I think anytime I see a building close to the shore in South Florida: Someday in the not-so-distant future, this is all going to be underwater.

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