It's called the Happy Coast estate, but perhaps they should rename it Scary Coast.
Cracks have begun appearing in a glitzy Shenzhen neighbourhood - one of many that have sprung up in the past decade or so on newly reclaimed land. In the Baoan central district, a fast-growing 1,500-hectare strip in the city's west, the cracks are up to 10cm wide.
'It's scary seeing all these cracks around the buildings where you live,' said Amanda Liu, 32, who owns a flat in Happy Coast, where they sell for 15,000 yuan to 18,000 yuan (HK$17,027 to HK$20,432) per square metre. 'The problem seems to be getting worse but we don't know what to do about it.'
A crack at least 30 metres long has appeared along a pavement, leaving the walkway tilting, with one side 10cm lower than the other.
At nearby Shum Yip New Shoreline, where flats can fetch 20,000 yuan per square metre, sections of the ground outside its main gate are undulating from the effects of subsidence. At another estate, West Coast Tea City, subsidence in the ground around some of the buildings has created cracks up to 10cm across. Sinking concrete and brickwork has created a hole a metre wide in a pavement along Zhong Yang Da Jie, or Central Avenue.
While engineers don't point the finger at anyone over the subsidence, their observations about normal industry practice suggest the local government may have cut corners on its reclamation and sold the newly formed land prematurely in order to recoup its investment.
Most of the land in the district was created through reclamation in the mid to late 1990s. The government of Baoan, one of Shenzhen's six administrative zones, has spent about 4 billion yuan reclaiming land and building infrastructure.
