100 story skyscraper approved for Miami

Isn’t Miami sinking?

Update: it looks like the elevator is Thyssen-Krupp, not Otis.

That said... I'm pretty sure TK's system WAS actually invented by Otis & sold to them sometime after 2008. Otis USED to have about a half-dozen videos on Youtube with CGI animations of a system that I remember was almost EXACTLY like the one TK actually built, rotating track-switches and all. I'm guessing that Otis just couldn't raise the capital to build a full-size working prototype, or TK was better-positioned to compete in global markets like China.

Regardless, the elevator system is WICKEDLY cool, in a "Willie Wonka" way. :-)

How 'bout those Dolphins?!?!

Wasn't there a Paul Newman and Steve McQueen movie about this? I believe Jennifer Jones had a role as well.....

Ooh, when that falls it's going to make such a "thunk" and I bet it leaves a mark

Building a 100 story building on a sinking sandbar is so Florida

folly! New building at sea level should be banned. People need to be relocated over a decade or two, to higher ground. At last New York is not flat and mostly at sea level, and is built on bedrock so arguments can be made for seawalls. I'm not saying Miami is uninhabitable but its going to be Venice situation and Venice has sea walls.

Only in Miami would they build a 100 story Waldorf Astoria RIGHT NEXT to a 10 story Holiday Inn.

Well, be fair: if they want 90 stories to be above the water line by the time they're finished, they NEED to build 100 to start with.

They should be rethinking those parking spaces as docking spaces for boats, though.

That isn't a tower. It's eight different blocks sitting on top of another splayed in different directions.

It looks fragile and must be tempting to any Muslin Jihadist who wants to destroy American capitalist arrogance.

r9 It looks like a Jenga game towards the end when its all about to go wrong.

It will destroy that building across the road when it falls.

Sigh, for the umpteenth time r6, NOTHING in Miami gets built "at sea level". We strip-mine limestone NW of Miami (look at Google Earth. See those HUGE square lakes? They're limestone mines), and dump millions of cubic feet of it to raise the local terrain to at least 10-20 feet above sea level.

The dikes along the Everglades aren't there to keep Miami & Broward DRY, they're to keep the Everglades WET. SFWMD could throw open the floodgates & turn the Everglades into mostly dry land within 6 months if it wanted to. Between the 1920s (when the main drainage canals were built) and 1980 (when the Nature Nazis threw hissy fits and got the feds to "restore" the Everglades), most of today's submerged parts of the Everglades were dry for YEARS at a time. When I was a kid, the Everglades north of what's now Weston NEVER looked like a body of water. In the 90s, they built the dike west of the Sawgrass Expressway, dammed up the old canals, and re-flooded the area for the first time in almost a century in the holy name of 'wetlands restoration'.

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward had the right idea in 1900 when he declared the Everglades a public blight & set out to completely drain it.

Miami will never be abandoned to the sea, no matter how many environmentalists jack off fantasizing about it. We terraformed it once, and we'll terraform it again if necessary.

^ Put down the pipe and go to bed

[quote] We terraformed it once, and we'll terraform it again if necessary.

I googled 'terraform' and it showed me this—

r7, the Holiday Inn is slated for demolition. The Waldorf Astoria's builder bought it to use the site (post-demolition) for material staging & one of the cranes.

They're using multiple cranes to expedite construction, because the City is making them take the cranes down from June 1 to September 29 since the hundred-story crane won't meet hurricane standards. So, they'll be building up to floor ~60 with hurricane-hardened cranes, then have ~9 months to finish 40 floors of concrete pours before bots cranes have to come down, then only one is going back up.

Will each unit get their own marina slip down on the 3rd floor?

Will the new skyscraper be floating away as seas wash away Miami?

Is Miami the tackiest city in the United States?

^ Las Vegas is far worse

10 whole feet about sea level!

No worries at all:

"Zone 1 (Yellow): This region consists of exposed or thinly-covered carbonate rocks. Broad and shallow sinkholes are common in this area. Cities in the zone 1 region include Miami, Coral Springs, Hialeah, and Hollywood."

Concrete supports along the seacoast need to be inspected yearly because the rebar inside concrete rusts and expands, pushing the concrete apart. We just had a condo collapse demonstrating this in real time.

10 feet above sea level is NOT protection against storm water surge in a hurricane. Because stormwater surge can undercut limestone, which is a water-soluble mineral, subject to erosion, a storm surge can eat away at any foundation. Hurricane Katrina generated a storm surge of 26 feet, which spread inland for 6 miles. Sea levels are rising, and could reach as high as a foot higher in the next few decades, if not more. That means the storm surges will be 1 foot taller and spread further inland than before. The naivete of the poster above who wrote about mining limestone and the waste of reclaiming the Everglades is pretty much an idiot.

r7 here. Thanks for the update r15. I knew that the land under the Holiday Inn was up for sale, but did not know it had sold, nor for that purpose. Thanks again.

[quote]They're using multiple cranes to expedite construction, because the City is making them take the cranes down from June 1 to September 29 since the hundred-story crane won't meet hurricane standards.

Since Hurricane season lasts until November 30 this seems a bit optimistic. For example, Hurricane Wilma (category 5) hit Florida on October 15, 2005. I wish them luck.

Oh boy, I’ve always wanted to live in Atlantis! 🤡

r21, the foundations for a 100 story building go down a HELL of a lot deeper than just 10 feet.

Modern rebar is also coated to minimize corrosion, even when fully-immersed 24/7. Or at least, the rebar used in "wet" conditions is. At the lowest level of the foundation (most likely to be perpetually wet), rebar isn't used as much, anyway, because it's mostly using high-strength concrete as artificial bedrock handling a load that's almost entirely vertical.

Steel rebar is the most common way to add tensile strength, but it's certainly not the ONLY one. For "wet feet", buildings combine multiple materials including polymers & epoxies. They're too expensive to indiscriminately use for EVERYTHING, but neatly solve the problem a building with "wet feet" (at least, in areas not prone to earthquakes).

Think of it this way: a tall, skinny tower might want to be a top-heavy pendulum... but it's REALLY kind of like an iceberg belowground. The building can't TIP, because its lowest ~10% is basically an epoxy-reinforced concrete box wedged into the Earth itself (kind of like a retaining wall), and it has plenty of tensile strength to not simply crack at ground level.

The reason buildings like the leaning tower of San Francisco have problems is because they CAN'T do that due to earthquakes. THEY have to deal with literal vibration & vertical wave action that Miami buildings don't... compounded by nearby underground excavation that invalidates the "dig a big, deep hole, fill it with concrete, and use the compressive strength of adjacent land & buildings to keep everything firmly in place". SF skyscrapers basically sit on huge springs & hydraulic shocks.

Miami will certainly have more tunnels in the future, but we're NEVER going to do something like excavate a literal underground railyard the size of multiple adjacent football fields a hundred feet below existing buildings like the new Transbay Terminal. If we ever did build something like the TT, we'd stick it under Bayfront Park. Or caisson-off & drain the construction site under Biscayne Bay, build it, and turn the area above into a new artificial island with skyscrapers integrated directly into it.

Meh, it's in Florida. I'll never see it in person.

Death Trap. No thanks

'It looks fragile and must be tempting to any Muslin Jihadist who wants to destroy American capitalist arrogance.'

I'd welcome the jihadist. That monstrosity deserves the worst that could befall it. My god the Miami politicians should be choking on all the kickbacks.

What is there to see above the 50th floor or so in Miami.

After the picture of it, don’t think you could pay to stay and yes, then you have Miami some sinking and the sandbars.

People, get this through your heads: Miami's geology is absolutely NO WORSE than New York's or Chicago's. And it's relatively TAME compared to what lies below London and Paris.

Lower Manhattan is SO SOGGY and unstable, they had to literally ram pipes into the ground and inject globs of cement grout into the World Trade Center's construction site's mud back in the early 1970s to STABILIZE it enough to let them dig it back out a few months later without having the sides collapse in from the weight of the Hudson River a literal BLOCK away.

From what I've read, London's Docklands are even WORSE than lower Manhattan... it's an ancient swamp that was transformed over the centuries by dredging and dumped trash into a wharf, and building a skyscraper THERE basically requires excavation and removal of a thousand years' worth of trash and muck so they can FIND the literal "solid ground" beneath it all... while PRAYING you don't accidentally stumble over something of archaeological significance that will force all work to come to a halt until the authorities decide what to do about it. Ditto, for Paris.

And Miami has an under-appreciated ADVANTAGE over New York and Chicago -- it's about as utterly and completely non-seismic as you can get. There are very few places that can claim a real earthquake is impossible. Miami is one of them. New York & Chicago obviously aren't sitting on the San Andreas Fault, but they're in that awkward position of being JUST vulnerable enough for unreinforced masonry structures to be live-threatening over the span of ~500 years.

It’s still a death trap. What happens when there is a hurricane and flooding?

R12 I'm not if I understand your post.

Are you saying most of the Florida swamps were drained in the 1920s?

And that all the current swamps are fake swamps behind levees made of limestone?

Disaster waiting to happen.

Castles built on sand.

How will a hundred-story building built below sea level on sinking ground survive a direct hit by a hurricane?

It's true WTC was built on landfill. The vast majority of midtown and downtown is bedrock near the surface. Between those neighborhoods, things are dicier-

r33, basically, yeah. Circa 1900-1940, the driving goal of Florida's government was to drain the Everglades & open it up to agriculture(*). To a large extent, they succeeded.

---

(*) draining the Glades was primarily for agriculture, because it IS low-lying, and residences & stuff need 5-20 feet of fill to raise them. Farms can just deal with an occasional flooding for a few days after a major storm.

One somewhat unusual city in S. Florida is Southwest Ranches. In contrast to neighboring Weston, Pembroke Pines, and Cooper City (where developers did 'dredge & fill' to create neighborhoods with big houses on tiny lots with huge artificial lakes), SWR's developer sold big (1+ acre) low-lying lots, with just the area around the house raised with fill (but not the yard), for people who wanted big yards that occasionally flood. It's very visible on Google Maps satellite view.

r36, how does an offshore oil rig survive a hurricane? The same way.

For a properly designed skyscraper, "wet feet" aren't a problem.

A 10-story tower like Champlain South is "danger zone"... tall enough to be vulnerable, short enough to tempt cut corners. With a hundred-story building, there are no corners to cut. At that size & scale, you do it perfectly, or you don't do it at all.

Companies that work on supertall skyscrapers don't fuck around, and most of them don't work on anything BESIDES skyscrapers. Their reputations are EVERYTHING, because their markets are like, "the eastern United States", not JUST "Miami", or even "Florida". If they sniff even a HINT of corner-cutting, they'll walk away & the developer will find itself blacklisted by the industry's contractors.

Thank you R38.

It think it fascinating how attitudes and public policy change over the decades.

Councils in my area were determined 50 years ago to eradicate mangroves because they harbored mosquitoes, litter and typhoid. But now mangroves are praised as life-givers and fish nurseries.

[quote]100 story skyscraper approved for Miami

nom nom nom nom 🤤

It'll be safe. We have Homeland Security now.

What a thing to say at this moment. The World Trade Center was an engineering disaster. The Citicorp Building was an engineering disaster that was saved by an engineering student who was doing her thesis on it and saw that its fancy shmancy foundation was royally fucked up. And isn't there a condo skyscraper in SF that is leaning? And then there is that skyscraper waving about in Shenzhen.

Supertall buildings are actually quite resilient in a hurricane. Taller and heavier structures have to be built on deeper foundations than a mansion or a Huddle House, and they're built of structural steel rather than wood. Also, the windows are impact glass, and are pretty damn solid. The foundation of this building will be drilled well below the sinky-sand surface of Miami. It won't sink, or topple, or be blown over by Hurricane Barbra.

They're built to stand firmly on the weight of the building's structure plus everything inside of it. Plus they're built out of very heavy and very sturdy materials that don't bend or twist too easily. Plus they're wrapped in special glass that could be hit by a flying fishing boat without cracking.

Meanwhile, the hot pink trailers you queens live in are death traps. If a twister doesn't kill you, your drinking will.

r43, the WTC was arguably an engineering MARVEL. There's not a comparable skyscraper on Earth, besides MAYBE the Sears Tower (which ALSO uses its sheathing as an exoskeleton), that could have a 757 plow into the ~85th floor, shearing away multiple floor slabs, ~1/3 of the exterior, and almost the ENTIRETY of 2-3 floors, and actually manage to remain standing for almost an hour.

A decade earlier, terrorists blew up a truck in its parking garage, and it barely made a DENT in the tower. The fact is, NO viable skyscraper could survive having a missile filled with jet fuel deliberately crashed into it. There are just some things that go beyond what anyone can hope to mitigate.

And, putting the WTC's death toll into perspective, how many people would die if you crashed a 757 into a big regional mall at 11am on Black Friday? Or into ANY stadium during a SEC or PAC10 football game? Or into Burning Man? The WTC deaths were horrific, but the fact that there were as few as there were is almost evidence of divine intervention when you consider how many people used to be inside the WTC on an average workday.

I hope this building is not engineered by the builders of the condo in Surfside, Florida.

R45 Both planes at the WTC were Boeing 767s. Larger, heavier, and carrying a lot more fuel than a 757 would.

I do not find 100 story skyscrapers desirable, or elegant. There's mostly the feeling they are striving and kitschy, and certainly because of the engineering issues involved almost foolish. It seems like an idea that should have peaked in the mid-70s, but here we are. I mean, who cares?

And in '93 it was said that if that bomb had been more strategically placed it would have brought down the building. Then nothing was done for 8 years.

Must be fun in a hurricane.

Didn’t 3,000 people die on 9/11? How is that a few?

This is a terrible idea for Florida.

r44, exactly. I'll bet half the pearl-clutching "Miami is drowning" queens have NO IDEA what "large-missile impact resistance" (for windows) even MEANS. Hint: imagine windows & doors glazed with extra-thick Gorilla Glass getting 2x4s shot into them with a cannon... and failing if it shatters.

Little-known fact: Florida has more urban tornadoes per square mile per year than even Oklahoma, Kansas, or Texas. They just don't do much damage here, because an EF-3 tornado is basically 15 seconds of Hurricane Wilma (which beat us up for more than an hour at its most intense point). A little baby EF-1 tornado that would take the roofs off of houses in Kansas barely does ANYTHING to a reinforced concrete house with a roof that's fortified with steel straps & connector plates on the inside.

If Kansas had Dade County's building codes, little baby EF-0 and EF-1 tornadoes would cease to be a serious threat for new homes, and EF-2 & 3 would mostly just cause expensive window damage. EF-5 tornadoes are deadly by any metric ("the only safe place to be is... somewhere ELSE"), BUT they're also exceptionally RARE... even in "tornado alley".

[quote] I hope this building is not engineered by the builders of the condo in Surfside, Florida.

I hope this building is not engineered by the builders of The Diversity Bridge.

How exactly are they going to terraform around/under buildings that are already built?

r53, the bridge didn't fail due to poor engineering, it failed due to poor construction management & process-adherence.

The ENGINEERING was fine. The BUILDER cut corners & fucked up. If they'd built it to spec & followed the engineer's directions, it would have been fine.

New York uses this technique ALL THE TIME to rapidly replace freeway overpasses with mininal road closure. You build the new bridge on the ground next to the old one (out of the way of traffic), then close the road for 3 days, blast & bulldoze away the old bridge, roll & jack the new one into position, done.

r54, often, the most cost-effective solution is to just reinforce the foundation & lowest floor, then remodel the building to make the former first floor into a de-facto basement that floods occasionally, and make the second floor the new first floor.

In downtown Atlanta (and elsewhere), this is LITERALLY what they've done in the past. Google "Underground Atlanta". They built a new road & sidewalks on a viaduct at second-floor height, remodeled buildings to move entrances to the second floor, and 25 years later, most people didn't even REALIZE there was an old street & entrances below the new street & sidewalks.

For shorter buildings (like single-family homes, townhouses, and 3-6 story apartments), you just jack it up above the old foundation, build a new higher one below it, lower the building down onto its new foundation & secure it, then rebuild the driveway & garage if necessary & add dirt to improve the yard if you can afford it.

When I attend Miami Beach meetings, I have heard the engineers give presentations about jacking up buildings, lifting the road a few inches, building "water gardens" (grated areas where the swale is that will catch water), but I have never heard anyone in Miami Beach or the city of Miami talking about terraforming.

R56, are people actually working on this?

'Terraform' is a newly-invented verb

no thank you. this will fall down like that other building...

I used "Terraforming" as deliberate hyperbole for effect, to emphasize the scale of civil engineering it took to make Florida the coalescing megalopolis it is today.

Actual 'terraforming' would be making Mars earthlike, with breathable atmosphere. So, Florida hasn't been LITERALLY terraformed... but if you look at a city like Weston & compare it to the terrain directly north, south, and west of it (and to old aerial photos from the 1950s), it almost seems LIKE 'terraforming', because Weston's original terrain, flora, and fauna were basically ERASED & buried under 20 feet of crushed limestone, then replaced with houses, offices, strip malls, and golf courses.

Well, without the neologism, I have not heard anyone talking about raising the streets by a story.

In Atlanta, they didn't have flooding on the original ground level, and they only did this over a five block area when there wasn't much there except a railroad (1928.)

If you listen to the way city of Miami and Miami Beach officials and engineers are talking, we're going in the New Orleans (surrounded by sea walls) direction.

I mean, Weston has a lot of man-made lakes. Southwest Ranches has canals on almost every street (many people lose their dogs to alligators who live in those canals). I imagine water is pumped into the lakes in Weston because that is how Pembroke Pines manages its water overflow.

None of these places are in king tide flood zones the way that downtown Miami is (or Miami Beach, for that matter).

Seeing as how they went to so much trouble terraforming in Florida why didn't they do anything about the alligators?

I watch those renovation shows and so often they have to build fences and keep dogs in at night to stop the marauding alligators. It's enough to make me very loath to visit.

Why? What's the purpose of this monstrosity?

Just to add... today, Weston has motherfucking ROLLING HILLS (or at least, what passes for 'hills' in Florida). It has leafy trees like you'd find in North Carolina. Fifty years ago, it was flat grassland that was muddy during the summer, and occasionally flooded during hurricanes, tropical storms, and multi-week rainstorms. There is literally not a single square INCH of Weston that a time traveler from 1950 would recognize.

Hell, look at old 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s aerial photos of Broward County, and just TRY to spot the future site of Sawgrass Mills. If you're LUCKY, you can find Andytown in the 1960s photos (at the intersection of US-27 and Alligator Alley), then look a few miles to the northeast... but even in the 1970s photo, you can *barely* make out the future route of the Sawgrass Expressway.

I was in middle school when the huge I-75/I-595/Sawgrass interchange was built. With god as my witness, it literally seemed like they were building it in the middle of the Everglades. Not "suburban Broward", or even "the far edge of town". It was literally "nowhere", and honestly kind of scary because there was NOTHING WHATSOEVER for MILES. Today, I-595 + SR-84 through the same area has ~16 lane.

Incidentally, there actually *was* some stuff a mile or two north of SR-84 west of University Drive... but mentally, it didn't exist, because there was only a single rickety little bridge over the New River Canal between University Drive & US-27(!!!). I think it was at what's now "Commodore Blvd" (where Broward Blvd dies out & unceremoniously dumps into westbound SR-84) amidst a sea of new townhomes today).

Dear R66 and R67. You can't stop progress.

Every new dwelling means extra taxpayers. I'm sure our new migrants from Afghanistan would adore a condo in Florida.

Won't it cast a shadow on Cuba?

r68, I'm not bemoaning it... I'm pointing out just how dramatically and graphically the area has been transformed in just 40 years, to provide context for comparing Florida's transformation to the very concept of terraforming. I think it's particularly hard for Europeans to grasp just how completely Florida's terrain has been transformed in a century.

For a good analogy... imagine if Floridians were in charge of the Zuiderzee Project:

* The only thing left of the Waddenzee would be a 50-100 meter wide canal vaguely resembling the Intracoastal Waterway through Broward County. The West Frisian Islands would be a wall of skyscrapers, with a tangle of finger canals, cul-de-sacs, and single family homes not unlike Marco Island or Cape Coral.

* the entire Ijsselmeer would look like Weston or western Pembroke Pines.

* Markermeer would still be a big lake, just because rich people living on the shore in Amsterdam would have presumably thrown a holy fit about having their waterfront view of a vast inland lake taken away from them.

Basically, we wouldn't have stopped until every last bit of the original terrain was transformed into waterfront property, using canals not just for drainage, but as a nearby source of free fill dirt AND to increase the amount of waterfront property.

r64, most non-Floridians don't realize it, but the REAL reason pool enclosures are so ubiquitous in Florida isn't "protection from mosquitoes", it's "protection from snakes and other assorted reptiles that would love to swim in your pool" (the mosquito-protection is just a nice side-effect). When I was growing up, my friends and I literally never played in our back yards, because they were always overrun with rattlesnakes and water moccasins. Even now, despite their neighborhood being mature & fully built-out for decades, it's STILL dangerous to reach into piles of stuff left unattended in the back yard for more than a few minutes. When I was there last Christmas, I almost stepped on a water moccasin the approximate diameter of my arm that was in the grass next to the driveway while getting out of my car. Thank GOD it was daylight & I saw it staring at me with its mouth wide open (their "attack" position), or I would have probably ended up spending Christmas Eve at the hospital.

^ water moccasins seem as fearsome as alligators

In other words, r70, the hideous Belgian North Sea coastline.

'After years of disappointment'

By whom? The builders and politicians who will be lining their pockets or the citizens who will see their city become uglier?

The terraformers are unusually pushy

How long is the elevator ride to the penthouse?

They continue building these huge structures in downtown Miami but it is a NIGHTMARE dealing with the traffic getting into the area. If you live in Broward and work in any of these buildings in downtown you will spend your whole life commuting.

What currently is the tallest building in Miami? How many stories?

r78 this 85 story building. The Four Seasons was the tallest building for many years before this went up.

In the skyscraper game getting approved and getting built are two very different things.

That location sucks. It’s better off in Brickell Ave.

That 85 story building is hideous. Looks budget. Looks like the Dollar Tree Tower. II doubt anyone can use a tiny balcony 80 stories up.

As a wise woman once said: "You're gonna die up there."

[quote]It’s better off in Brickell Ave.

Where on Brickell?

[quote]Looks like the Dollar Tree Tower.

😆 r82.

Exactly r80. The "Empire World Towers" were also one of many proposed projects for this block of Biscayne Blvd that never took off.

why would anyone build anything that tall in a hurricane zone?

This is a more appropriate 49 story building just one block north that is nearing completion.

Super tall structures being built by carpet bagger developers suck. And they will all be occupied by refugees from NYC and rest of the New England, and drug lords from the Caribbean and South America. Local people with money have no desire to live in these monstrosities, they buy mega homes with yards and pools in the western areas of the County.

I'm glad Miami is finally joining the "hundred-story" club, but I think Miami really needs to clamp down on developers building towers that span almost the entire north-south distance of the lot. There are ALREADY towers in downtown Miami and Brickell where someone below the 40th floor will literally NEVER have direct sunlight coming into their windows, because 2 or 3 rows of wide, taller buildings to the east or west (depending upon which side they're on) act like venetian blinds and leave them in eternal shadows.

In cities with sane zoning laws, the strategy for maximizing the floor area of your building is to make it taller, more slender, and shape the upper floors so they're as close as you can get to a square rotated 45 degrees (so the points are towards north/east/south/west), which maximizes the amount of direct sunlight that can shine into buildings behind them. It doesn't necessarily happen all day, or every day, but it ensures that everyone gets to have at least a little direct sunlight for part of the year.

In Miami, developers maximize height by building towers with upper floors that are SHALLOW rather than NARROW, thereby ensuring that in the tragedy of the commons, nobody besides the people living in last row of buildings before the bay can actually get real sunlight.

The other problem with downtown Miami is claustrophobia. Miami allows developers to build WAY too close to the street, with NOTHING human-scaled along the sidewalk to soften the blow. Walking through Brickell and downtown Miami doesn't feel like an "urban canyon", it feels like an "urban CAVE". I've been to a lot of big cities, but downtown Miami leaves me with a weird sensation of feeling "crushed" in ways no other downtown -- Manhattan, San Francisco, and Chicago included -- does.

Maybe it's just me, but at street level, downtown Miami and Brickell are literally starting to feel like the sensory overload from a street scene in a dystopian videogame.

The problem in downtown Miami isn't the crowds... it's the relative lack of them, and the efforts by street-facing businesses to make up for it by covering every fucking square inch of vertical wall space within view of a sidewalk with video displays. You can't look at ANYTHING without having your peripheral vision constantly assaulted by blinding animations. Add to that the total lack of public parking, so every building needs its own garage and curb cuts... so you're walking down the sidewalk, constantly getting distracted by video displays that are either animated or change every second or two, AND you have to constantly watch out for cars crossing the sidewalk in front of you every 50-100 feet.

Simply put, downtown Miami is DIFFERENT than it used to be, and in some ways it's BETTER, but to me at least, the experience of being there quickly stops being energizing, and rapidly becomes merely stressful and tedious. Downtown Miami today feels less like South Beach on Friday night, and more like a mall on Black Friday, or an airport terminal.

This will never happen.

All of this sounds insane and unsupportable.

Oh, I almost forgot my other big bitch about downtown Miami... the sidewalks are ABSURDLY narrow by "downtown" standards, and there's a STAGGERING amount of shit encroaching into what little sidewalk there IS.

I've never seen another big city that's so casual about sticking signs on metal poles right smack in the path of pedestrians walking on the sidewalk. And the sidewalks below Metromover tracks are literal zig-zag obstacle courses.

The most tragic thing is, Brickell's sidewalk mistakes were 100% preventable. 95% of the skyscrapers west of Brickell Avenue were built a decade or more AFTER the Metromover tracks were shoehorned in place, on lots that were bulldozed to the ground and completely rebuilt from scratch. Miami SHOULD have taken the opportunity to give developers a small FAR and/or height bonus in exchange for giving the city an additional 5-foot setback easement for sidewalk-widening, instead of casting the narrow-obstacle-course status quo into concrete for another century.

Here's just one small, tiny example of what I'm talking about re Brickell's sidewalks and obstacles in pedestrian pathways. How many can you count? And this one block is hardly unique. Roam around Google Maps Streetview for a few blocks, and you'll see what I mean about things like fire hydrants, bollards, sign poles, and everything else.

An even better view (looking straight down the sidewalk towards the west, and the sign pole that's LITERALLY right smack in the middle of the sidewalk)

And... here's another Brickell sidewalk that was clearly never intended for an actual pedestrian to walk on

[quote] my other big bitch about downtown Miami... the sidewalks are ABSURDLY narrow… and there's a STAGGERING amount of shit encroaching

Don't you have toilets in Miami?

Another fire hydrant located with complete disregard for pedestrian safety.

I honestly couldn't even try to make a view like this up. This HAS to be an ADA lawsuit waiting to happen... two sidewalks, on opposite sides of a 3-lane road, neither of which are wide enough for someone in a wheelchair with perfect aim to fit.

It's obvious what happened here, at least on the side of the road with the building... years ago, the city approved a building that encroached into the sidewalk because it provided a covered public arcade... then years later, the building's owner closed it in, and nobody from the City gave enough of a shit to notice or care, and now there's a dangerous, pedestrian-dysfunctional sidewalk.

Pedestrians get short shrift in Miami.

R95 I mentioned to my neighbour something similar to that blocking the sidewalk. He said to me that normal people don't walk along sidewalks, he said they walk across them from their property to their car.

One of the BIG design sins you can see all over downtown Miami was where the City allowed AT&T to put U-verse cabinets where they block the right 2 feet of the sidewalk, even in places where they had plenty of room to put the cabinet closer to the street outside of the direct pedestrian path. In other cities, they'd have made AT&T not only put the cabinet next to the road (outside the normal pedestrian path), they'd have additionally made them HANG it from a pole to reduce the bulk projecting INTO the pedestrian space, bury it in a vault under the sidewalk, or negotiate with the adjacent building owner to hang it from the side of the building (high enough for people to walk underneath).

As obnoxious as the U-verse boxes are, I still think the sign posts and hydrants are the worst pedestrian safety hazards. And yeah, I've personally slammed my shoulder into the sign poles, and *almost* tripped over one of those hydrants once.

That said... I think part of the problem is the fact that due to king tides and storm surge, most of the buildings have first floors that are 2-3 feet higher than the sidewalk, so half the space that in a normal downtown would be available for sidewalk use ends up getting consumed by stairs and wheelchair ramps next to the narrow sidewalks. Hopefully someday, when the city raises the streets and sidewalks to match the first floor heights of the new buildings, they'll be able to widen the sidewalks into the space presently taken up by those stairs.

OK, one last particularly galling stretch of sidewalk to illustrate Miami's total disregard for pedestrians on sidewalks. Literally FIVE signs less than 20 feet apart, centered almost perfectly in the center of the sidewalk. Oh... and notice where the vertical pole supporting the sign for NE 6th Street is located... despite having plenty of space to put it 15 inches further to the right, where it WOULDN'T have blocked the sidewalk.

[quote]In cities with sane zoning laws, the strategy for maximizing the floor area of your building is to make it taller, more slender, and shape the upper floors so they're as close as you can get to a square rotated 45 degrees (so the points are towards north/east/south/west), which maximizes the amount of direct sunlight that can shine into buildings behind them. It doesn't necessarily happen all day, or every day, but it ensures that everyone gets to have at least a little direct sunlight for part of the year.

r88 are you from Florida? Unless you have a nice view of the bayfront or ocean, direct sunlight likely what the developers DONT want. The energy costs rise exponentially, it costs a fortune to air condition rooms with a direct view of the sun in Florida. You will bake during the summer months and shades only help so much. If your goal is an energy efficient building you need some sides that don't have direct sunlight.

r100, yes I am. My second-floor windows all have Bahamas shutters... and I *hate* them, because my upstairs rooms are always dark & gloomy. My downstairs front & rear walls are about 60% floor to ceiling sliding glass doors, and it's ENORMOUSLY nicer. I only have about 1-2 hours/day with DIRECT sunlight pouring in, and they're my favorite hour(s) of the day, "energy costs" be damned.

I'd *hate* to live someplace where I didn't get at least an hour per day when I can see the literal sun directly without literally sticking my head outside and looking straight up.

Back when I was shopping for a house, I had the opportunity to buy a loft in Brickell Station Lofts (across the street from the Metrorail station) at a fantastic price. I passed, because it was on the 4th+5th floors, facing south into a neighboring old 2-story building that's guaranteed to eventually get replaced by a 30+ story tower that would have left me with a future view of a 40-50 foot wide de-facto light shaft. No thanks, that would have completely SUCKED.

Wow, what an ugly building the Brickell Loft building is.

Before Covid, I was so happy to leave Dade everyday. Except for a very few neighborhoods, it's so ugly down there (ugly in an expensive way).

Well, it looks like the sidewalk shown in r96 won't be a problem much longer... it's about to get demolished to make room for a new 40 story condo.

Apparently, One Bayfront Plaza in Brickell will be the same height as the Waldorf Astoria... but only 93 stories high.

Supposedly, the developer wrung his hands for months before deciding to go for quality over quantity since it's going to be the tallest all-residential building in Miami... basically, forever, unless the FAA loosens up its height restrictions. After the Waldorf and OBP, the only viable site in downtown Miami left for a 1,049-foot tower is already (secretly, but it's literally the worst-kept secret in Miami) earmarked for Amazon's future Miami/LatAm HQ. There are technically two other blocks where 1,049-foot towers can get built, but both of them have relatively new, relatively tall skyscrapers on them already and are worth too much money for someone to buy and demolish anytime soon.

[quote]Supposedly, the developer wrung his hands for months

Months? He has been trying to develop that site with the tallest building on the East Coast south of NYC since I moved here in 1999.

R104 Give it up. Amazon isn't setting up a Latin American headquarters in Miami, or anywhere else down there in the Cocaine Belt. It's an internet company. They do business over Zoom, and can run their South American operation from Seattle and Virginia without having to endure Miami's uniquely unbearable population.

If you're lucky, you'll be able to get jobs stuffing crates for Prime Air at FLL, or grinding your knees into dust working in one of their fulfillment warehouses out on Lake Okeechobee.

From what I've read, Fort Lauderdale WANTS to allow thousand+ foot skyscrapers, but the rest of Broward County is using the FAA as a scapegoat to hold Fort Lauderdale down.

I've read two variants on the story:

1. The present FAA-imposed height limit in downtown Fort Lauderdale is due to the now-defunct diagonal runway FLL *used* to have. In theory, downtown Fort Lauderdale was in the 'abort' path for planes that came ashore over Pompano, made their final approach above I-95, then made a hard-left 45-degree turn to land on the old diagonal runway as soon as they cleared the I-95/I-595 stack. That particular approach was only used ~3 times in 30 years (the last time was the day after Tropical Storm Isaac, when there were rain bands offshore and over Plantation & Davie , but clear weather above I-95), and only once after the interchange stack was built, but because it was officially "on the books", the limit remains until Broward County petitions for its removal... which it refuses to do.

2. The 500-foot height limit is the FAA-imposed nationwide default that exists everywhere unless the county asks the FAA to increase it... which Broward County refuses to do.

Apparently, one of Broward County's concerns is that if it allows Fort Laudeadale to go higher downtown, the beach will be next. Supposedly, Hollywood in particular is schizophrenic about the issue. It absolutely doesn't want taller buildings at its own beach, but doesn't have the financial resources to fight off endless lawsuits from New York REITs & knows it'll eventually be outgunned and lose.

So... Hollywood uses Broward County as its scapegoat & whipping boy. As long as big, bad, Broward County keeps saying, "No!", the City of Hollywood is off the hook. The moment Broward says "OK" to Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood will be endlessly fighting off real estate lawyers wanting to build 80 story towers in Hollywood.

Fort Lauderdale is trash, and always will be.

Why are they always the last to know these things?

r105, Tibor Hollo was wringing his hands over 93 stories with high ceilings, or 100 stories with lower ceilings. He spent ~10 years fighting to get the height limit increased to 1200 feet so he could build a tower with 100+ stories AND 10-foot ceilings, but finally threw in the towel & decided he wants to see the building topped off before he dies (he's 94).

For those not from Miami, Tibor is basically the Pope of Miami Skyscrapers. If HE couldn't get 1200 feet approved, it's not happening for anyone within the next 25 years.

r106, you're forgetting that Amazon's biggest shareholder (Jeff Bezos) would LOVE to own a penthouse in downtown Miami on top of its future tallest skyscraper. Everything else is just an excuse & pretense for its construction.

It’s Florida.

Fuckety-fuck-fuck FLORIDA.

Let ‘em all die in a grease fire lit by Floridian cockroaches.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Another possible supertall for Brickell. Same 1049-foot height limit as the Waldorf Astoria, but likely to have fewer stories with higher ceilings.

A few have noticed that the renderings look like someone LITERALLY designed the tower to resemble the underside of a huge penis. :-D

It looks like Dade County enlarged the pair of "1049-foot" zones a few months ago to allow more supertalls. Now, if only it would raise the limit to 1200 feet to allow a hundred stories with 10-12 foot ceilings, or 1800 feet so we can beat New York....

Incidentally, even at only 1049 feet, buyers of condos in Miami's buildings will get to have something generally denied to New Yorkers... big balconies. In New York, supertalls keep people behind grids & bars, when people are allowed to go outside that high *at all*. In Miami, you'll literally be able to lean over the edge of your own ~90th story balcony, longneck in hand.

R113 It's as hideous as Gill-Man.

No Muslin is going to destroy MY American capitalist arrogance, [R9].

That ugly mess at R9 would be tempting for any American lunatic shooter let alone any Muslin Jihadist lunatic.

[quote]the renderings look like someone LITERALLY designed the tower to resemble the underside of a huge penis

You need to look at more penises.

That's okay. In a decade the building will be only 95 stories above sea level.