Looking at the wall of towers along Miami Beach, I was sure I’d got it: the tall buildings are on the beach for the hurricanes.
Nope. Wrong on every count.
Higher up, the wind is worse. The National Hurricane Center says the top of a 30-storey building gets, on average, about 32 km/h more wind than the ground: roughly one extra category on the Saffir-Simpson scale. They aren’t shelters either. Miami Beach is a barrier island, the whole thing is an evacuation zone, there are no shelters on it, and the authorities specifically warn that high-rises give a false sense of safety. You leave for the mainland.
So why so many? The boring answer: money. From the 1950s Collins Avenue swapped mansions for hotels and condos (Fontainebleau, Eden Roc), and the last decade added the luxury towers. Seafront land is expensive and sea views sell, so you build up.
What hurricanes did leave is invisible: the building code. Andrew (1992) did over 45,000 million dollars of damage and exposed a state with more than 400 different codes. Out of that came the South Florida Building Code (1994) and the statewide Florida Building Code (2002). Miami-Dade and Broward are the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, the only place where the whole envelope (windows, doors, roofs) must survive repeated hits from a 2x4 plank fired like a missile.
And the Surfside collapse of 2021, 98 dead? Not a hurricane either: NIST’s 2026 report blames design and construction flaws, added loads and years of corrosion.
The towers aren’t there because of the hurricanes. They’re there despite them.