Residents In 26-Story Landmark Miami Condo Face Boot Over Condemnation Order Due To Rotten Windows; Cost To Replace Could Force Some Into Foreclosure

In Miami, Florida, The Miami Herald reports:

• Shortly before the Christmas holidays, residents of Miami's landmark Palm Bay Towers condo -- a bastion of privilege where the monthly maintenance fee exceeds most folks' mortgage payment -- found a letter taped to their doors outlining what one unit owner later called 'extremely unpleasant' news: The city had condemned the building. Water and power would be cut Jan. 3, and the building would be torn down.

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• The building hasn't been shut down, though it took an emergency court order and the unusual intervention of the City Commission to override, temporarily, the actions of its own chief building official, who declared the ultra-posh tower unsafe under a law typically used to condemn blighted properties.

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• The feud -- and Miami building official Mariano Fernandez's condemnation order -- centers on the 26-story tower's nine-foot-tall windows, at least some of which are badly deteriorated and unsafe in a hurricane. Because this is no ordinary building, these are not just any windows -- but 1,875 floor-to-ceiling sliding doors and glass panels that constitute the exterior walls of the three-cornered tower, which rises dramatically on massive pylons sunk into Biscayne Bay at Northeast 69th Street.(1)

For more, see Residents of landmark Miami condo building at war over windows.

(1) According to the story, full window replacement is a job that, by some estimates, would cost around $5 million. Because the building has just 72 units, most as big as a house, that reportedly works out to special assessments ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 for each owner -- and even more for some residents who own more than one unit. Although the building was constructed as a private club for a select slice of the city's social elite -- some longtime residents are now elderly or ill, no longer wealthy, and say they would be forced out of their homes or into foreclosure because they cannot afford the assessment, the story states.