Renaissance Tower Condo Owners File Class Action After Now-Evacuated Myrtle Beach High-Rise Found to be Unsafe

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges the companies and individuals responsible for overseeing Myrtle Beach, South Carolina’s Renaissance Tower knew for years about steadily worsening damage to structural steel components supporting the now-evacuated 21-story high-rise condominium building yet failed to make any further inspections or repairs and instead “allowed the damage to worsen.”

The 34-page complaint says that like the Champlain Towers South building that catastrophically collapsed in Surfside, Florida in June 2021, the Renaissance Tower abuts the beach and the Atlantic Ocean and is structurally supported by steel and concrete. The suit says the high-rise’s steel has “steadily corroded and weakened” to the point that the building is no longer structurally sound, which earlier this month prompted the evacuation of residents who, per the suit, now face a more than $2 million assessment for repairs among other yet-unknown costs.

According to the case, the tragic collapse of the Champlain Towers South building prompted the defendants, the Board of the Renaissance Tower Horizontal Property Regime and its management, to have the building’s corroded structural steel components evaluated again for the first time since 2018. The engineer who evaluated the steel under the building in 2021 found, “as expected,” that it was “substantially more corroded and weakened” than during its last inspection, and advised the board that it could not continue to delay repairs to the high-rise’s structural steel components, the lawsuit relays.

 The Post and Courier reported late last week that unit owners were sent an email that said it was “imperative” to get out of the building until its steel frame could be better secured. The email stated that it was after removing exterior finishes that the resort’s frame was found to be “in substantially worse condition than previous analysis was able to show.” 

The filing alleges, however, that a former building manager for the Renaissance Tower stated to a resident, one of the plaintiffs, in or around 2016 that “the steel under the building was in bad shape and needed to be repaired or replaced.” 

Instead of repairing the building’s structural steel, the defendants chose “to undertake expensive building improvement projects” that did not address any safety or structural problems, according to the suit.

 This month, as work finally began to repair the structural steel under the Renaissance Tower building, contractors observed steel that was “so corroded and weakened” that an engineer was called in to further evaluate the conditions, the suit says. That engineer found that the Renaissance Tower building was “not structurally sound” given that some of the steel column flanges had “completely disintegrated,” posing a situation dangerous enough to call for the building to be evacuated, the complaint relays.

 According to the case, the defendants were told that the Renaissance Tower must be shored up before any further repair work could be performed, and that the scope of the structural repairs must be expanded to include the removal and replacement of the bottom portion of the building’s columns. 

“The damage to the steel structural components is extreme,” the lawsuit says. 

To date, the building remains unoccupied until residents are permitted to return, the suit states. The case says the evacuation of the Renaissance Tower has left some owners homeless while others have been left to “purchase and live from tents in a nearby campground.” 

Other owners, meanwhile, had their units listed for sale and are now unable to sell them, or had a contract for the sale of their unit and had a buyer back out, the lawsuit states.

The complaint says that “[d]espite being left homeless, stuck paying for temporary housing, or deprived of income from a tenant,” Renaissance Tower condo owners now face a more than $2 million assessment for repairs to the building’s structural steel, as well as an unknown additional assessment for temporary shoring to make the building safe for occupants, and costs for “the expanded scope of repairs needed to address the extremely damaged condition of the steel.” 

According to the case, the defendants have “less than $1.3 million” in reserves in 2022, which the suit claims is a “grossly unreasonable” amount for a 21-story, 322-unit condo on the beach in coastal South Carolina. 

“Due to the lack of maintenance and repairs and the grossly insufficient reserves held by the Regime, the unit owners are being forced to pay substantial assessments for repairs to the building and the assessments continue to increase given the temporary shoring and expanded steel repairs now necessary at the building,” the suit states. 

The lawsuit looks to cover all persons or entities who owned a residential condo unit in the Renaissance Tower on October 7, 2022.

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