Seac Pai Van residents fear becoming ‘second Sin Fong’

A group of proprietors from the public housing estate in Seac Pai Van have handed a petition to the Macau government, expressing their concerns regarding the construction quality of their building. They urged the government to commission an independent third party to conduct a full examination of the property’s structure.
In the petition addressed to the Chief Executive Chui Sai On, the residents stressed that there were many issues concerning the public housing projects in Seac Pai Van that various government departments had failed to resolve. It also listed several problems regarding the quality of the buildings and the facilities inside.
They included the so-called “paper wall” incident where paper bags were found in the wall of an apartment in the affordable housing project “Edificio Koi Nga”, located in Seac Pai Van. Cracks were also said to have emerged on the walls and ceilings of units. There was even a case in which the switch box of an apartment was damaged, causing a power shortage due to water leakage nearby.
The petition also included some issues at Seac Pai Van that are affecting the daily lives of the residents, such as the lack of shops and problems regarding the water quality.
“Now, we implore the government to provide a time frame to allow an open and transparent third party professional surveyor to assess the structure of the buildings, and to hold the contractor and supervising institutions responsible,” the proprietors wrote in the petition.
“The government spokesperson has reiterated that the part of the apartment [with the paper bags in it] was not the load-bearing wall (shear wall). However, who knows if the load-bearing wall was filled with bags too? It is unacceptable to explain it as a ‘construction flaw’,” the petition said.
Speaking to the media, one of the Koi Nga apartment owners, Mr Cheang, said that after talking to his neighbors, he noticed that many of them had found objects such as plastic bags and newspaper inside their walls. “We are really worried that the public housing buildings we are living in have structural problems because several public housing projects [throughout Macau] have had issues as well… Therefore, we hope that the government can find a third party to determine whether there are actually any structural problems,” he said.
“If there are already problems like these, even if it is only one to two years since we moved in, will the buildings tilt to one side in the future and will we have nobody to appeal to and become homeless, just like [the owners] of Sin Fong Garden?”
Moreover, Mr Cheang said that even though they have been offered free repair services for their apartments, he is still concerned that there has been no examination on the structural safety and no solution offered to the fundamental problems.
Another proprietor, Mr Souza, claimed that the cracks on the ceiling of his bedroom had already joined together and encircled the whole ceiling. In fact, many decorators told him that the construction quality is very poor and the construction workers were very neglectful. He said that he notified the authorities as soon as the cracks in his apartment started appearing. “But the only feedback I got after waiting for a long period of time was that they would find someone to inspect our unit. Some people came to our apartment once and inspected it, without doing anything else,” he said. “They told me that it was only a minor problem and said that they would have some workers to cover the cracks with cement. For me, they have not addressed the issue that affects our lives.”
Apart from the problems inside the apartments, some facilities inside the buildings, including elevators and emergency exit lights, were also said to be prone to malfunctioning. “There are times when all three elevators [in a building] have been out of order…  There were times when they had even stopped working for several hours,” said Mr Loi, a Koi Nga apartment owner.
“There were already incidents in Hong Kong where people died in a malfunctioning elevator. We are really worried about it. Those elevators [in my building] were brand new and they just broke down like this. What if one of or several of the elevators’ wire ropes were broken, it would be fatal,” he said.
“Another issue that threatens our safety is the emergency lighting [that did not activate when the power was cut off]. It is just like when there is no water coming out from a fire hydrant. You can imagine how scary it is,” he said.
The proprietors argued that the government is ultimately responsible for all the problems in Edificio Koi Nga because it is that authority that chose the contractors who failed to deliver on the project in a professional manner.
“We don’t want to be the second Sin Fong Garden,” they warned.

Seac Pai Van project cost hundreds of millions

According to data from the government, the public housing projects on the Seac Pai Van CN3 land plot, where the Edificio Koi Nga is located, cost the government a total of MOP380 million.
Housing Bureau information indicates that Koi Nga comprises eight buildings. The apartments there were selling, on average, for MOP17,166.9 per square meter. The prices of T1 units ranged from MOP488,000 to MOP626,000; T2 from MOP622,300 to 917,700 and T3 from MOP911,300 to MOP1,097,300.