In recent years, the capital city government has stepped up the permits granted for high rises. City residents have seen how apartment buildings have been authorized where there were single family homes in prime residential and commercial areas such as Piantini, Evaristo Morales and Naco. Lack of parking, size of streets, drainage and water supply has been ignored. A recent interview in El Dia looks into the consequences of the boom in new high rise developments.
The recent torrential rains in Greater Santo Domingo, which saw sudden accumulations exceeding 300 millimeters, flooded Greater Santo Domingo from midnight to the early morning on Wednesday, 8 April 2026. There were stranded vehicles and collapsed intersections.
While the volume of water was exceptional, architect and urban planner Marcos Barinas warns that the crisis is less a natural inevitability and more the result of decades of unchecked urban development and administrative negligence. The situation of flooding in Greater Santo Domingo can be repeated any day now. These are the tropics in climate change times.
The paradox of a porous city
Speaking on the program El Día, Barinas highlighted a geographical irony: Santo Domingo is naturally equipped to handle water. The city is built on descending terraces that slope toward the Caribbean Sea, sitting atop highly porous limestone soil that facilitates natural filtration.
However, this natural advantage has been systematically dismantled by a “concrete jungle” expansion. As soil is replaced by asphalt and cement, the ground loses its ability to absorb rainfall, transforming streets into high-velocity runoff channels that pool in the city’s lowest topographic points.
High-rises overburdening aging infrastructure
A primary driver of the worsening floods is the shift toward vertical density in sectors like Naco and Piantini. Barinas noted that these neighborhoods were originally designed 50 years ago for single-family homes with large permeable yards.
“Where one family once lived, we now see towers with 100 apartments,” Barinas explained. This exponential increase in population density has occurred without a corresponding upgrade to the primary drainage systems. The current systems were never intended to support the hydraulic load of modern high-rises.
Furthermore, the proliferation of underground parking lots has created a new hazard. By sealing a plot of land with concrete, developers essentially create massive basins. When drainage systems fail or become saturated, these subterranean levels effectively become indoor swimming pools, destroying property and endangering residents.
Regulatory capture and “wild” development
Barinas was emphatic that the crisis stems from a failure to enforce, or the deliberate bypassing of, existing urban regulations. He highlighted that many of these new regulations were illegally passed as the city government gave in to the pressure of real estate developers. He denounced that construction permits many times ignore density limits and environmental impact studies.
He recommended that when buying, people check if the high rise complies with city rulings, such as leaving space for the sidewalk (2.5 meters and 0.80 cm for green area) and the space between buildings. He said if these rulings are violated, then it is more likely that non-seeable but crucial elements of the construction, such as the sewage system, may also not comply with the norms either. The seller will be long gone and the buyer will have to carry out major investments to resolve the situation. Barinas said that right now, because of the lack of government oversight, the quality of the high rise pretty much depends on the ethics and the intrinsic standards of the builder.
Barinas criticized the authorities. “Every day there are less restrictions,” he commented. He said where there was a single family home, now there can be 150 housing units. This is happening with many high rises that have been fitted for Airbnbs.
“The city we see today is the result of decisions made 20 or 25 years ago,” Barinas warned. The lack of political will to curb “wild” development means that even as the city grows economically, its structural vulnerability increases.
A desert of green space
The shortage of urban parks has also reached a critical point. Barinas pointed out that the last major urban park was built four decades ago. The Carolina Mejia administration has rebuilt many park areas, but with few exceptions, concrete prevails in most of the parks.
Beyond recreation, green spaces serve as vital “sponges” for the city. The systematic elimination of green buffer zones on streets and in patios in favor of high density residential developments has stripped the capital of its natural defense mechanisms against climate events.
Recommendations for mitigation
To reverse this trend, Barinas insisted on immediate and long-term actions:
• Strict enforcement: Municipalities must stop granting variances that exceed the land’s carrying capacity.
• Infrastructure adaptation: If high-density zoning is allowed, the public drainage infrastructure must be upgraded beforehand, not as an afterthought.
• Territorial planning law: While the recently passed Law of Territorial Ordering is a step forward, Barinas noted its results will take time and require firm present-day implementation.
Other urban architects have called for permeability mandates. Permeable paving requirements for new constructions could significantly reduce immediate runoff into the streets.
“None of this is inevitable,” Barinas concluded, stressing that while the weather is unpredictable, the city’s catastrophic response to it is a choice made by planners and politicians.
Read more in Spanish:
El Dia
El Dia
13 April 2026