MIAMI ALERT! Porsche Skyscraper's Worst Nightmare Came True | KaLintos

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Right now at 18,555 Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles Beach, a 641-foot skyscraper is sinking into the ground. Not because it was built badly, not because it was neglected, but because the city underneath it is dissolving and the people who sold $840 million worth of condos inside it may have known the ground was moving before the last buyer signed.

[00:00:23]3 inches. That is how far the Porsche Design Tower has dropped since 2016.

[00:00:29]A building worth more per square foot than almost any residential tower in the United States has been sliding downward at a rate its own engineers did not predict. And what that silence has cost the people living inside it is only now coming out.

[00:00:45]His name is Gil Dezer and in 2012, he made what he called the most audacious bet in the history of Miami real estate.

[00:00:53]He paid $36 million for the oceanfront site at 18,555 Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. It is a thin strip of barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway, 6 miles north of Miami Beach. It was, he said, the most [music] coveted beachfront address in South Florida.

[00:01:17]His vision was explicit and enormous. He would build a 60-story residential skyscraper, the first in the world where residents could ride an elevator while still seated inside their cars.

[00:01:29]He called the elevator the Dezervator after himself. He brought in Sieger Suarez Architects, one of Miami's most celebrated luxury firms. He licensed the Porsche Design name from Germany's Porsche Design Group, signing the master licensing agreement in 2012, the first time a global automaker had ever put its name on a residential tower anywhere in the world.

[00:01:52]>> [music] >> He told anyone who would listen that the building would redefine luxury, that it would make everything built before it look ordinary.

[00:02:01]The original budget was $560 million.

[00:02:04]The tower was supposed to open in 2016.

[00:02:08]All 132 units were pre-sold at prices starting at $6.5 million per apartment with the four-story penthouse listed at $32.5 million generating $840 million in commitments from people who believed every single number on the brochure.

[00:02:25]But here is what nobody told those buyers.

[00:02:29]Before the first resident took the Deezer Vader to their sky garage, researchers at the University of Miami were already picking up something unusual beneath the building. The limestone wasn't holding. Trouble did not just rise from below. It was built in from the start.

[00:02:45]Here is the number that should stop you cold.

[00:02:48]The Champlain Towers South, the building that collapsed in Surfside in 2021 and killed 98 people, sat just 4.3 miles from the Porsche Design Tower.

[00:02:59]The University of Miami study that found no subsidence beneath Champlain Towers before it fell also found that the Porsche Design Tower had one of the greatest levels of sinking of any building in the entire study area.

[00:03:12]Almost 8 cm since it was completed. Here is what that means in plain language.

[00:03:17]>> [music] >> Subsidence. Every single floor, column, and foundation pile in a skyscraper is connected to every other. There is no backup. There is no redundancy when the ground beneath one corner moves faster than the ground beneath another.

[00:03:32]Engineers have a specific name for this class of sinking. They call it differential settlement, meaning the building does not go down as one unit.

[00:03:41]It tilts. It torques. [music] One side drops while another holds. That uneven movement generates internal stress across every concrete slab, every window frame, every utility line running through the structure.

[00:03:58]The design team faced a choice when the Porsche Design Tower was conceived. They could conduct deep geotechnical analysis of the barrier island's specific limestone layers beneath that exact site, the expensive, time-consuming route, or they could rely on the standard pile foundation system used across Miami's coastline [music] and assume the ground would behave as it always had.

[00:04:22]Cost and schedule drove the decision.

[00:04:24]The models checked out. The permits were approved. The concept [music] worked on paper. Pile foundations in Miami were designed to accommodate several tens of centimeters of total settlement in a structure.

[00:04:37]But that margin left almost no room for the scenario where parts of the ground moved at different speeds.

[00:04:44]The sand and limestone layers beneath Sunny Isles Beach do not behave uniformly. The weight of a 641-ft tower pressing down unevenly on those layers, combined with the vibrations of neighboring construction and the daily movement of tidal water through porous rock, could accelerate the separation.

[00:05:03]The vulnerability was built in from the start.

[00:05:07]Stay with me [music] because what comes next is worse.

[00:05:11]The warnings didn't start last year.

[00:05:12]They didn't start after the building opened. Geophysicists began documenting ground movement beneath the barrier islands north of Miami while some of the buyers were still waiting to take possession of their units.

[00:05:24]By 2016, the Porsche Design Tower had completed construction and the satellite record was already beginning to tell a story. Subsidence rate, measurable.

[00:05:34]Trend, downward. Response from the tower, none on the public record. By 2017, the building opened to residents.

[00:05:43]The Dezervator ferried Lamborghinis and Ferraris to sky garages 60 floors above the Atlantic. Prices in the resale market climbed. Buyers paid $8 million, $12 million, and more.

[00:05:56]The building's developer called it a catalyst for a new era of Miami luxury.

[00:06:01]By 2023, researchers at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, using data from Germany's TerraSAR-X satellite, a device capable of measuring ground movement to within 1 mm, had completed 7 years of continuous monitoring. Their conclusion was unambiguous.

[00:06:23]35 buildings along the barrier islands had subsided. The Porsche Design Tower showed one of the highest rates of any building in the study.

[00:06:31]Nearly 70% of buildings in northern Sunny Isles Beach were moving. The study's lead author, Farzaneh Aziz Zanjani, described the discovery as unexpected. The study's senior author, Falk Amelung, a geophysicist at the University of Miami, said, "Almost all the buildings at the coast itself, they're subsiding. It's a lot."

[00:06:54]The published study stated something that should have triggered immediate action across the industry. "There are no indications," it concluded, "that subsidence will come to a stop."

[00:07:04]No independent structural audit of the Porsche Design Tower was publicly announced. No building-wide disclosure was filed with residents.

[00:07:13]The people being asked to buy resale units in early 2024 were handed the same brochures from 2016.

[00:07:20]The ground beneath the building had moved. The marketing had not. The question was no longer whether the Porsche Design Tower was sinking. The question was how long the people responsible for selling it had access to the monitoring data, and what they had done with that information while the dezervator kept running.

[00:07:38]If you want to follow this story as it keeps moving through the monitoring data and the courts.

[00:07:44]Subscribe so you will not miss what comes next.

[00:07:49]Right now, as you watch this, construction cranes are still rising along the Sunny Isles coastline. New towers are going up on the same barrier islands, on the same limestone, on the same sand.

[00:08:01]Florida's response to the 2021 Champlain Towers collapse was supposed to change everything.

[00:08:07]The state passed Senate Bill 4D in 2022, a sweeping condominium inspection law requiring structural inspections for all buildings three stories or taller, starting [music] with those 30 years or older within 3 miles of the coast. It was supposed to be the safety net.

[00:08:24]Instead, it revealed a worse problem.

[00:08:27]The law addressed aging structures.

[00:08:30]The Porsche Design Tower is 10 years old. It does not trigger the mandatory inspection threshold. The buildings identified in the University of Miami's 2024 subsidence study, many of them under 15 years old, exist in a regulatory gap the new law does not reach.

[00:08:48]The study's own conclusion made this explicit. The study stated that while South Florida high-rises are designed to undergo several tens of centimeters of settlement of the entire structure, differential settlement induces internal stresses that can lead to structural damage. The inspection laws do not require monitoring for ground movement.

[00:09:08]No Florida statute requires a developer to disclose satellite measured subsidence data to a buyer closing on a [music] unit.

[00:09:16]One buyer who purchased a resale unit in Sunny Isles Beach, a resident whose name appears in property records but who asked not to be identified, said the subsidence study reached her through a news article, not through any disclosure from the building or the seller.

[00:09:31]She said it is not just the money. She added, "It is the feeling that your home might not be [music] what you were told.

[00:09:39]Gil Dezer announced a new branded tower for the same stretch of coastline, Bentley Residences, a 63-story building at the same address, slated for completion in 2026.

[00:09:52]It will feature four Dezervators.

[00:09:55]Units start at $5 million.

[00:09:57]The most expensive penthouse lists at $57 million.

[00:10:02]It sits on the same limestone, above the same sand, on the same barrier island where 35 buildings are already going down.

[00:10:10]Every new listing along that coastline is an admission that the original promise [music] that this ground could carry any weight no longer exists.

[00:10:20]The Porsche Design Tower is not just a building. It is a case study in how a calculated risk becomes everyone else's problem. Buildings constructed in the same decade, on the same coastal barrier islands, under the same permitting standards, are still standing right now.

[00:10:37]Nobody is monitoring the differential settlement beneath them. Nobody is telling buyers.

[00:10:44]Right now, at 18,555 Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, a 641-foot skyscraper is sitting 3 inches lower than it was when its buyers signed. The Dezervator is still running. The cars are still going up. The ground beneath the Porsche Design Tower has not been publicly explained. No independent structural engineer has filed a public report [music] answering what happens if the differential rate accelerates. No court document has established [music] what the developer knew about the satellite data and when.

[00:11:19]The people being asked to buy into the next tower on that strip of coastline are being handed a brochure without a single public [music] accounting of what is happening beneath the one that came before it.

[00:11:32]When the ground beneath a building is moving and no one is required to say so, who protects the people living inside?

[00:11:39]Share your thoughts below.