With work finally over on the so-called fix of the Millennium Tower, residents are now saddled with a $6.8 million bill out of an estimated $20 million in cost overruns on the long delayed and troubled retrofit project.
The ambitious project was originally billed as costing $100 million, relying on 52 piles sunk to bedrock to bolster the tower on two sides last fall.
But when the building experienced still more sinking and tilting during construction, the city intervened. The project ended up being cut to just 18 piles and being substantially completed by late August. The scaled back project ended up costing about $120 million, based on the accounting provided by tower homeowner’s association to residents.
Residents were notified recently that they faced an emergency assessment of $10 per square foot of condo space to account for overruns. The bill comes due on Oct. 1.
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“I don’t know what to do with this place, because it is costly – I cannot live in it,” said Mehrdad Mostafavi, who moved out his third floor tower condo in June after an apparent sewage backup in his kitchen sink. Millennium fix engineers had warned backups could be a byproduct of the tower’s tilting.
Mostafavi says he was forced to move out because of the mess and was in the middle of figuring out a way to clean it up when he was hit with the bill for nearly $14,000 from the Tower owners association.
“It’s a luxurious building and famous building, but unfortunately it is not like this for me as an owner,” Mostafavi said. “I am really suffering.”
In an accounting sent along with the bill, the tower association said that after homeowners were compensated for lost property value, the association was allotted $150 million to pay for securing the high-rise to bedrock, pay for legal bills, restore reserves and account for other expected costs.
But the association told residents in the letter the $150 million sum was still not enough, given all the project’s many setbacks and headaches.
“The delays and the city’s heightened requirements resulted in significant unforeseen project cost increases,” the association’s letter to residents said. The bill notice provided a rough accounting as to what triggered the residents $6.8 million share of the shortfall. The letter noted that residents were not alone in having to pay -- the tower’s developer and the fix contractor Shimmick pitched in a total of $10 million to offset project overruns.
Mostafavi said the bill came at a time he had already had to tap retirement savings to pay for his ruined kitchen.
“I'm really having a hard time seeing how can I leave for the retirement -- how to get out of this apartment and do my retirement” he said. “It is very costly…. they keep asking for more money and this is not acceptable for me.”
Meanwhile, recent monitoring data shows that since the project ended in June, the building is stable but the tilting has only improved by a fraction, leaving the high-rise stuck leaning 29 inches at the northwest corner.
