The Social Origins of the Miami Condo
As the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have made vivid over the last few weeks in a series of startling color-coded maps, Miami-Dade's coastline was utterly transformed by scores of new condominium apartment complexes, including many beachfront high rises, in the 1970s and 80s.
That boom, reported the Times’ Miami Bureau chief Patricia Mazzei, was driven by promises of a leisurely beachfront lifestyle at affordable prices: the “Florida dream.” As historians—and as individuals with family connections to the Miami condo—we also contend that it was fueled by a quest for community.
Figure 1. Display advertisement for Surfside Towers, “Surfside's first and only oceanfront condominium,” Sam Kaufman (developer), Morris Lapidus (architect), Surfside, Fla., Miami Herald, Feb. 23, 1969.
With the tragic collapse of Champlain Towers South last month, the subsequent evacuation of Crestview Towers (where, full disclosure, Deborah Dash Moore once owned an apartment, bequeathed to her by her grandmother), and worrisome reports emerging from other nearby buildings, the shine is coming off this sandy skyscraper idyll. Urgent questions about the efficacy and regulation of co-ownership are casting yet longer shadows.
Figure 2. Deborah Dash Moore’s grandmother’s apartment at Crestview Towers, North Miami Beach, Fla., 1970. Photograph by MacDonald Moore, 2014.
Most discussion of the tragedy, and rightly so, has centered on condo dysfunction and the ways in which policy makers, lobbyists, and the profit motive undermined regulation and, ultimately, safety.
But by focusing on what went wrong in Surfside, we’ve lost sight of the societal benefits of condo living, and the ways the Florida condo was a creative solution to new social problems, shaped by deep-seated cultural forces and even the welfare state.
As Matthew Gordon Lasner writes in his book High Life, South Florida's first co-owned buildings—an arrangement pioneered in the U.S. in Manhattan in 1881—began appearing just after World War II.
Figure 3. Display advertisement for Pompano Surf Club cooperative, Milton N. Weir (developer), William T. Vaughn (architect), Pompano Beach, Fla., 1956.
These complexes were small. Most were developed by groups of prospective owners, hailing from such places as Chicago and Pittsburgh, for themselves. The first, tellingly, was called the Cloisters.
Within a few years, developers began to take note of the trend. By the late 1950s they were filling the shoreline with two– and three-story for-sale complexes.
The first high-rises went up in 1957, including Sea Tower in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Sea Towers in Bay Harbor Islands, just a few blocks from Champlain Towers South. Soon, residential towers crowded the South Florida “gold coast,” from South Beach to Palm Beach with North Miami-Dade the epicenter.
Figure 4. Sea Tower, Terrell J. Murrell (developer), Igor B. Polevitzky of Polevitzky, Johnson & Associates (architect), Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., 1958. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2011.
Figure 5. Coral Sea Towers, Frank J. Walker (developer), Carlos B. Schoeppl (architect), Bay Harbor Islands, Fla., 1957. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2011.
Much of the appeal stemmed from the sense of community high-rises offered. Retirement as we know it today was a novel season of life in the postwar U.S., a product of longevity, thanks to improved access to health care (including, after 1965, Medicare); Social Security (which issued its first checks in 1940) and union pensions; the falling cost of housing thanks to serialized production; and better access to cheap land, thanks to the car, government highway programs, and inexpensive air travel.
The 1950s and 60s saw, for the first time ever, lots of ordinary older people living independently in homes of their own, often far from their children. As one lawyer explained to the New York Times in 1970, the condo offers “retired people perhaps the first opportunity to live by themselves with a feeling of dignity and self-esteem.”
But leaving the workaday world of the Bronx, Long Island, or Cleveland for a life of “permanent tourism” meant needing things to do and people to do them with, people, we might add, who shared your interests and with whom you were comfortable. Like resort hotels and retirement complexes, large apartment buildings helped people avoid the growing scourge of loneliness.
Miami Beach and North Dade apartments, with the sunshine and seashore, allowed transplants to feel that every day was Sunday. They created a community of strangers—even as family and friendships from up north help guide them into particular buildings.
Figure 6. Common areas at Ensenada condominium, Aventura, Fla., DonArl (developer), Morris Lapidus (architect), 1971. Photographs by Kelly Kagan, 2003.
Also driving the Florida condo boom was the emergence of Miami-Dade as a center of Jewish American life. As Deborah Dash Moore writes, Miami Beach initially drew Jews for vacations, pulled by hotel owners from the Catskills who imagined the Beach as a winter version of the upstate New York resort belt.
Along with hotel entrepreneurs came Jewish builders like Moses Ginsberg. He had built apartment houses in Brooklyn, then hotels like the Carlyle in Manhattan, but on Miami Beach he turned to refashioning Lincoln Road. This confluence stimulated the growth of Miami Beach as a Jewish resort. Gone were the signs “every view without a Jew.”
And if vacationing on the Beach was good, why not move down, especially as air conditioning and cheap flights became available? From snowflakes to snowbirds to permanent residents, Jews, especially from New York, started to adopt the Florida lifestyle even as they were creating a new version of it, one based on communities of apartment dwellers who shared lobbies and swimming pools, mah jong and card tables. Most had grown up in apartments and many had always lived in them; now they got to share amenities.
Figure 7. “Live year round in Florida” display advertisement for Caribbean Towers, “Miami Beach's first FHA waterfront Co-op,” “Chick” Braunstein and Robert and Samuel Lipman (developer), North Bay Village, Fla., New York Times, Dec. 18, 1960.
Jewish developers started constructing large buildings, appealing to their fellow ethnics. Nathan Gumenick and his wife Sophia from Virginia built Southgate Towers (1959), one of the first, followed by Emil Morton and Morton Towers (1961), and Sam Halperin and Imperial House (1962).
Figure 8. Aventura's Ensenada with community building foreground and other area high-rises in the distance. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2011.
Aventura, a subtropical Co-op City in North Miami planned, starting in 1968, for 24,000 apartments in dozens of high-rises (and where Lasner’s grandparents once owned), was developed by three Jewish builders: Don Soffer from Pittsburgh and Arthur Cohen and Arthur Levine from New York.
Even the architects were Jewish. Southgate Towers, Morton Towers, and Imperial House were designed by the prolific Miami designer Melvin Grossman. All the original buildings at Aventura were designed by Morris Lapidus, once his commissions designing glamorous Miami Beach hotels, as Alice Friedman discusses, dried up.
Figure 9. Map of Aventura emphasizing recreational amenities from sales brochure, ca. 1971. Courtesy of Robert M. Swedroe.
Some of these new high-rises, especially early on, were rentals (including Southgate, Morton, and Imperial House). Most, though, were condos.
Before the boom, which quickly lined Collins Avenue with condos, for-sale apartments in Miami, as in most of the U.S., were cooperatives, in which the homeowners association holds title to the entire building and ownership of units is conveyed by a “proprietary” lease. This system was simple to set up and minimized some of the problems inherent to co-ownership: associations could easily qualify for commercial loans for big repairs, for example, and could evict owners who became liabilities.
But mortgage lenders were skittish about associations wielding so much power. What if they had to foreclose and the association interfered? As a result, to buy an apartment, one usually had to pay cash.
That worked fine for people who had taken advantage of New Deal and post-World War II homeownership programs of the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill. They could sell a house in Levittown and use the cash to buy a co-op apartment in Florida. But what about all those New York City tenants? They could rent in Florida. But without rent control—which New Yorkers still enjoyed—seniors living on fixed incomes were constantly threatened with displacement in the Sunshine State.
Figure 10. “Condominium…at last a way to really own your apartment home in Florida.” Detail of display advertisement for the Landmark, Halifax Enterprises, Daytona Beach, Fla., Florida Trend July 1962.
The solution came from Europe via Latin America and Puerto Rico: the condominium, in which the association holds title only to the common elements and the apartments are conveyed with individual titles, each corresponding to a cube of air. Florida mortgage bankers began to promote the system locally and nationally in the late 1950s and it quickly took off.
Like any form of individual or collective property ownership, it came with risks. But by and large, with frequent adjustments to the state laws that set standards for condo by-laws, the new owners made the system work. For many, this was the first time they had owned property. Still, they felt quite comfortable running things; competition to serve on condo boards was often fierce.
Figure 11. Hidden Bay 40-story condominium, Sieger Suarez (architect), Aventura, Fla., 2000, left; Acqualina 52-story condominium, BSG Development, Robert M. Swedroe (architect), Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., 2006. Photographs by Kelly Kagan (left), 2003; Matthew Gordon Lasner (right), 2005.
The social world of Miami-Dade condos continued to evolve. New buildings have mostly gotten taller and more luxurious. Older ones have fallen out of fashion; prices in many have dropped relative to inflation. All have become more diverse, with retirees joined by younger people and families, and Jews by Latinos and, especially, Latin Americans, as we’ve seen at Champlain Towers South.
Its catastrophic collapse is an urgent reminder of the fragility of condo ownership and a call for new safeguards. But as we mourn the lives lost, let’s also remember the community that once flourished and the social void that the condo filled.
