What Is a Billionaire's Triangle?

Hint: It both doesn't exist and is taking over South Florida's shoreline.

While flipping through this month’s Architectural Digest a few days ago (the print version of which still lands in my physical mailbox), I came across a full-page ad for a new beachfront condo development in Miami called The Delmore. The rendering in it feels both too good to be true and underwhelming, the kind of curvy contemporary architecture that you know looks better on the page than in the flesh, at the same time it doesn’t look meaningfully different from any other of the hundreds of oceanfront condo buildings that line Florida’s shores. In the image, dense tropical foliage extends from either side of the building to the edge of the image, leaving the impression of an untouched coastline, save for this assemblage of ultra-luxury condos. Or “mansions,” as the copy calls them, which is technically correct. They start at $15 million.

The ad’s copy also describes this spot as “200 feet of direct beachfront in Billionaire’s Triangle—Miami’s most revered enclave.” That’s one way to refer to the site of the Surfside Condo Collapse, where less than four years ago 98 people died in the middle of the night when their home imploded thanks to shoddy construction and preventable deterioration, and on which this new condo building will sit.