A São Paulo Building Collapse Follows Six Years of Ignored Orders

BRAZIL · SÃO PAULO

The fine is the part being quoted. The interdiction that was ignored for six years is the part that matters.

A building under construction collapsed in the east zone of São Paulo in the early hours of Saturday, killing at least three people, and municipal records show the site had been interdicted in 2019 and the order disregarded.

What Is Known

The structure, of eleven to twelve storeys and still under construction, came down overnight from 12 into 13 September in the east zone of São Paulo.

Three deaths are confirmed and three people are missing, among them a child and two women. Those figures were still changing through Sunday and should be read as provisional.

The company responsible is New Home Construtora.

The Paper Trail

The R$119,000 (about US$23,400) fine that has been widely quoted dates from 2021, and it was imposed alongside a legal action by the municipal attorney’s office seeking to halt the work.

The record begins earlier. The city interdicted the site in 2019 for building without proper permits, and construction continued regardless. In 2024 the municipality conditioned any future building authorisation on the existing structure being demolished first.

Reported as a single fine, this reads as a regulatory lapse. Read as a sequence, it is six years of enforcement that did not stop the work.

Why an Interdiction Fails

A municipal interdiction in Brazil is an administrative order. Enforcing it against a builder who continues anyway requires either physical intervention at the site or a court order, and both take time the construction does not wait for.

The 2021 fine and the accompanying legal action are what the system does when the order is ignored, and the fine’s size relative to the value of an eleven-storey building explains why that step rarely ends the matter on its own.

The Responses

Mayor Ricardo Nunes said the construction company’s owners will be arrested.

New Home has pointed to earthmoving work on an adjacent property and asked that a connection be investigated. That defence has not been assessed by any authority and is reported here as the company’s position.

What Has to Be Established

The cause of the collapse is a technical question that will be answered by structural examination of the debris, not by the permitting record, however poor that record is.

Building without a permit and building unsafely are different failures, and a site can have one without the other. What the permitting history establishes is that no approved structural design was reviewed by the city, which removes the check that would ordinarily have caught a design fault.

Rescue operations were continuing on Sunday, and the confirmed toll may rise.

São Paulo has a substantial stock of buildings raised without approval, concentrated in the peripheral districts where the city’s housing shortage is sharpest and where enforcement capacity is thinnest.

That is the context in which a single collapse becomes a policy question. The municipal register of interdicted sites is public, and the number of sites on it where work has continued is the figure that will be asked for this week.

More: Brazil news in English, every day from The Rio Times.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the collapse happen?

In the early hours of Saturday 13 September 2026, in the east zone of São Paulo.

How many people died?

Three confirmed dead and three missing as of Sunday. The figures are provisional.

Which company was building it?

New Home Construtora.

Had the site been sanctioned before?

Yes. It was interdicted in 2019 for building without proper permits, fined R$119,000 (about US$23,400) in 2021, and in 2024 the city required demolition before any new authorisation.

What does the company say?

It has pointed to earthmoving on an adjacent property and asked that a link be investigated.

Sources: Poder360, Metrópoles, Revista Oeste, CNN Brasil.