People, Place, Possibilities

Dubai developer Damac Properties has struggled to gain traction on turning the site of the collapsed Champlain Towers South —one of the deadliest structural failures in U.S. history— into a luxury condo tower. A year and a half after Damac launched the sales process for the project, its first in the U.S., not a single unit has sold. Where some see bold and ambitious. Others see tone-deaf, even foolish. Both can be true depending on where one stands.

Damac filled a $120 million vacuum nobody else would fill, chose to ignore the reason the vacuum existed, and build a product no one wanted built. But what if Damac had raised their heads and looked up for inspiration instead? Up north that is. The 9/11 Memorial pools in New York, museum adjacent, drew 2.3 million visitors in 2023. The Champlain Towers South collapse is not something to cover up and forget. The resilience of the Magic City is borne by tragedy as much as by glamour. The emotional intelligence the redevelopment requires is the kind that does not model well in Excel. But executed right, it creates a one-of-a-kind mold that is hard to truly replicate. Having not been in the room, it is hard to say what was behind the decisions that were made. Notwithstanding, success in real estate has always been about the translation of human needs and desires into place. From the sales record, it is clear the translation was not accurate here.

Damac’s own VP admitted that a lot of people did not want to be the first purchaser — a tell that points to a stigma problem, not a capital problem, given Surfside’s broader market trends. No amount of amenity stacking solves a stigma problem. Only acknowledgment does and that is precisely the lever a memorial-led project pulls.

A developer, as sponsor of a place, owes that place three things at once: respect for what happened there, respect for the people who carry it, and an honest accounting of what the site can become. Had a memorial been central to the plan rather than a footnote negotiated down to the smallest acceptable footprint, community activation would have been a breeze. What organization would not want to be part of a memorial, even if the county decided to sit it out? The same buyers willing to pay a premium for the view might also have been open to being donors for the cause — donors who arrive already invested, reputationally and emotionally, in seeing the project succeed. And what retailer would not want a presence where condo units sold for tens of millions of dollars?

Bal Harbour Shops didn’t win on retail math alone — it won because the address became aspirational, and aspiration compounds. A memorial doesn’t repel luxury retail and hospitality; it filters for the tenants who want to be associated with gravity rather than just spend. This could have been another Bal Harbour, with outsized historic significance, had someone fluent in belonging and placemaking been in the room.

Instead, Damac treated the memorial as a liability to be negotiated down to smithereens as not impact condo sales, when it should have been the anchor asset the pro forma was built around. That is the real distinction between bold and tone-deaf: bold respects the place enough to let it set the terms; tone-deaf tries to monetize around it and hopes nobody notices. That dogma has proved expensive — $120 million, and counting, expensive.