CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – Two Charleston-area law firms are investigating the sudden mandatory evacuation of a downtown condominium on behalf of condo owners.
Shuttered balconies and boarded windows line the facade of Dockside Condominiums, shielding public view of the inside of the building that towers over the Charleston Harbor. Owners and renters gathered across the street at Gadsden Park on Wednesday after being denied access for weeks, hoping to retrieve belongings and answers.
Graham Stone, 85, dreamed of a forever home looking over the Cooper River. He was fortunate enough to stay with his daughter after the city leaders ordered a mandatory evacuation of the complex at the end of February, but said many of his neighbors are stranded.
“There are other people that are crying all night because they are about to go bankrupt, a lot of them as a matter of fact. You are on fixed income and all of a sudden you got on the street, you got a big problem,” Stone said.
The Anastopoulo Law Firm and the J. Davis Law Firm launched a class action investigation following the Feb. 28 evacuation of the building, located at 330 Concord St. beside the International African American Museum.
Attorney Roy T. Willey IV said residents have been trying to get some answers about what led to the evacuation and what happens next.
“They have been seeking answers about the situation from all manner of entities, from the city to the engineers, and the truth is that they aren’t getting a lot of answers,” Willey said.
City staff and Dockside officials said they collaborated on an official move-out plan sent to residents on March 28.
Starting on April 14, two units will be packed and moved out at a time. Dockside officials expect the condos to be clear by the end of June or beginning of July, barring any complications.
The city of Charleston ordered residents to evacuate the building by 5 p.m. on Feb. 28. Residents were told to pack their perishable items but to leave behind all furniture.
“What happened in a situation that leads to a 24-hour evacuation where members of our community are told, ‘Take your personal effects, take what clothes you can carry, but don’t take anything else because the building might fall down,‘” he said. “How do we get to that point? There are a lot of unanswered questions.”
The condominiums were built in the 1970s. The order, the city said, came after the Dockside Association Board said their engineering firm recommended the evacuation of the building tower.
“A properly managed and maintained building does not get a 48-hour evacuation notice,” Davis said. “And so our firm has been engaged, together with Roy, to investigate the management, maintenance, capital asset reserves, and understand how it came to be that over 100 people were displaced from their homes on a 24-hour notice.”
The attorneys set up a website, DocksideLawsuit.com, where prior and current residents and owners can provide details that could help the investigation.
“We know that over the course of the last several decades, since the 1970s when this building was first inhabited, that there are a lot of people that have gathered information about this building, that have talked to engineers, that have talked to former construction companies, that have talked to folks that lived here, and at this point, we’re just asking them to come forward,” Willey said.
He said “numerous homeowners” contacted the firms and he expects the investigation to result in “at least one lawsuit,” but did not rule out either a single class-action suit or multiple individual lawsuits.
He said no suit has been filed as of Wednesday and they have not yet determined who might be named as defendants if a lawsuit were to be filed.
“People were kicked out of their homes in February and they know about as much now as they knew then, and it’s enraging. It should be enraging, the amount of information that has been disseminated and provided,” Willey said. “You know, to say it’s a dearth of information puts it mildly.”
Stone said he was told to continue paying his monthly $1,300 and $160 for a parking pass, despite being unable to access his living space.
“People have asked but they keep saying there is so many expenses, legal expenses and that sort of thing. And that’s why we have to keep paying, and if we don’t, basically the building is facing bankruptcy,” Stone said. “I’ve never felt poor in my whole life. Now I feel poor.”
Stone said he spent $10,000 moving into the complex and expects to pay $15,000 to move out because of premiums from moving companies, who are asking tenants to sign releases.
Questions emerged from 2022 inspection
City of Charleston officials said the situation stems from a contractor, SKA, inspecting the building back in 2022.
They were renovating a privately owned unit when they found issues with the column and floor connection, the city said. After inspecting some other parts of the building, they found the structural issues stemmed from problems with the initial construction, but SKA did not deem the building unsafe at the time.
More recently, the Dockside Association hired another engineering firm, WJE, to conduct a more in-depth investigation to assess the load capacity of the floors. This firm sent a letter to the Dockside Association on Feb. 25 that stated the building was unsafe for continued occupancy.
The city immediately initially set a March 7 deadline for the association’s board to provide more details about any structural issues that led to the evacuation recommendation. That request included details on any threat to the townhomes and neighboring properties.
It also set a deadline of March 14 for an evaluation of “the likelihood for a progressive tower floor collapse.”
The Dockside Board of Directors issued a statement on March 7, stating the board was in “frequent communication” with the city of Charleston and were working toward “providing a response timeline as soon as possible regarding any potential threat to neighboring buildings” but said the deadline could not be reasonably met.
“Needed assessments regarding the integrity of our building requires additional testing analysis by our structural engineer. That testing is underway, but this is a complex issue, and we need the analysis to be accurate,” the statement read in part.
The tower building has 112 units, 60 to 70% of which are occupied full-time.
One resident said more than 200 people were affected by the evacuation.
“We were told the problems and that it would all be fixed. It should have already been fixed, that is why we are paying you $1,000 a month,” Stone said. “Who I really feel sorry for are the people who just bought them months before. Put their money in, took a mortgage out, now they are on the street. How does the city morally deal with that?”
Neither Dockside officials nor the city has provided a comment.
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