The Porsche Design Tower in Miami, built in 2014, is one of 35 luxury beachfront properties along the coast that a recent University of Miami study has found to have sunk by up to three inches into the unstable sandy earth. Three inches might not seem like a lot, but this is much faster than most experts anticipated. If you, like footballer Lionel Messi, paid $9 million for an apartment in the Porsche Design Tower, your view of the skyline is now a few inches lower than it was a decade ago.
The collapse of a 12-story apartment building nearby in 2021, which killed 98 people, caused geologists to keep a close eye on the buildings in the area. They haven’t yet raised any alarms about the sinking buildings, but warn that continued sinking at these rates could mean long-term danger. The sinking could be a sign that rising sea levels are accelerating the erosion of the property’s underlying limestone. Much of south Florida is built upon limestone, and this problem is not limited to just the Miami area.
“Almost all the buildings at the coast itself, they’re subsiding,” Falk Amelung, the study’s senior author and a geophysicist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School, said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “It’s a lot.”
“It’s probably a much larger problem than we know,” Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Herald.
The 35 buildings in question include the Ritz Carlton Residences, The Surf Club Four Seasons, Trump Tower III, Trump International Beach Resort, and several other high-end condos. The study used satellite imagery to measure how much the land beneath each building had sunk, and was able to pinpoint that measurement down to the fraction of an inch. All of the buildings had sunk to some degree, with measurements showing between 0.8 inches and three inches. It is possible that at least some of the Porsche Design building’s sinking is due to the ground settling underneath the building as it’s still relatively new construction and the 56-floor building with an integrated car elevator is quite heavy.
