‘Your Million Dollar Houses Will Soon Be Under Water’ Wake Up Call Confronted Icon SoBe People as They Woke Up

August 23, 2016

Photo by Stephen Conlan.

Somebody had a lot to say to the sandbar dwellers of Miami Beach, although most of the message went squarely to the residents of the ritzy condos at Icon South Beach, the first building facing it, right across a temporary parking lot and causeway overpass. “YOUR MILLION DOLLAR HOUSES WILL SOON BE UNDERWATER” was painted (we assume) sometime overnight in simple, black capital letters, on the rooftop parapet of the gutted South Shore Hospital’s bones.

The meaning is obvious to anyone in Miami Beach not asleep under a rock. This resort town of extravagant real estate prices is under unusual and immediate threat from sea level rise. As experts and hard-hitting longform magazine article writers keep reminding us (Remember when Rolling Stone blared “Goodbye Miami” across a two-page spread?), Miami Beach is reckoning with its very real fate. Oh, and whoever wrote that thing way up there should either work on their English or their geography. Plenty of houses will be underwater yes, but the condos it’s facing aren’t houses, they’re homes. There are a few actual houses, but they are to the east. At least the posh people at Icon won’t have to constantly see it anymore though, in addition to having more time until inundation at umpteenth floors up. Developer Russell Galbut, who has been trying to build on the old hospital site for years, quickly had it painted over.