Residents of one of the buildings in Balashikha fear that the walls of their apartments will soon collapse. The building, which is almost half a century old, has cracks from the roof to the foundation. It has never undergone major renovations, and they plan to build a high-rise building with underground parking two steps away.

“There are cracks, there are cracks in the basement, the foundation is collapsing.

A house in Balashikha near Moscow is riddled with cracks. They permeate it from the first to the ninth floor. This is the picture both outside and inside the building. Residents are afraid that the house is about to collapse.

- This wall was just hanging out! I had to strengthen it myself.

The house on Karl Marx Street is a former factory dormitory. It was built in 1971. Since then, according to residents, there has never been a major or cosmetic renovation here. And so far it is not expected.

“The only thing that was changed in 2011 was the cold and hot water pipelines, and at our expense,” says Tatyana Chushkina.

People are confident that the situation may worsen in the near future. Previously, opposite the house stood the Sputnik recreation center, an identified cultural heritage site. A few years ago, the historic building was demolished, and a new residential complex is going to be built in its place.

“When the foundation was demolished, our house shook. It felt like an earthquake, the floor moved, the dishes rattled,” recalls Svetlana Shchukina.

According to the project, two 17-story buildings with underground parking will appear here. Construction will take place close to the house. Residents say that these walls will not survive such a neighborhood.

- If there is a roadway and a parking lot underneath it, then this house will simply fall on this parking lot!

As follows from the document, the construction permit was issued a little less than two months ago, although a moratorium on infill development has been declared in Balashikha for a year now. The construction of new housing is prohibited due to the lack of social infrastructure.

"The allocation of the site was carried out back in 2011, and the developer received the right to this targeted development long before the construction ban. He was already paying rent, doing design work", explained Irina Solovyova, deputy head of the Balashikha urban district administration for urban planning.

“The moratorium was introduced in February 2016, and the permit was issued in June 2015. There are no contradictions here,” says Andrey Pantyukhin, head of the construction support department non-residential purposes Ministry of Construction Complex of the Moscow Region.

As for the collapsing house, it was decided to change the management company. The building was finally included in the program overhaul. However, when it will start is unknown. In the meantime, beacons have been installed on the walls, with the help of which they will monitor the condition of the house.

"We have installed beacons. When the builders begin construction work, you need to observe them not only statically, but also in dynamics,” explains Mikhail Kostyshak, head of the housing and communal services department of Balashikha.

This means that construction will resume. They will only stop him if the house continues to collapse. Residents have only one thing left to do: hope that their walls won’t burst at the seams when they start digging a pit 20 meters away from them.

Do you know this type of house?! When another residential building is “inserted” between houses a long time ago. It’s very convenient for builders: construction materials are saved, communications are all at hand. Much less hassle connecting them. Here's what might happen technical problems, which can create a real danger to the people living in these houses, apparently they did not think about this when they made the decision to build.

This is exactly the problem that has now arisen in one of the Tolyatti houses located at Tsvetnoy Boulevard 3.

In the photo there is an insert house shown as an example

But such an example already happened in Tolyatti, at 55 Voroshilov Street, which began to crack and the residents of the entrance had to be resettled in other housing.

And this is a “new” house with problems, Tsvetnoy Boulevard 3. 16th block,

The cracks were clearly visible not only in the apartments, but throughout the entire entrance.

The wind blows from the cracks

One of the residents says: Three years ago we made repairs, and now you can see for yourself what is left of it. We also have a through gap in the corridor to the neighbors a couple of centimeters wide. We foam it periodically, but it’s all useless.

Residents say it is scary to live in such a house. However, city authorities from the construction department claim that it is too early to draw conclusions, but that a construction and technical examination needs to be done. All this is wonderful, but questions arise: after all, someone gave permission for the construction of this insert, and what’s most interesting is that permission was given for a 9-story insert, and then the developer company was somehow able to achieve an almost doubling of the height of the building. The question arises: on what basis? And if they received a positive statement from the examination, then it is necessary to hold accountable the experts who considered that the increase from 9 to 17 floors does not pose a danger to the neighboring house.

It was said that the residential insert was put into operation on December 31, 2015, that is, under the previous city administration. And the city government assures that it will solve the problem. “Maybe,” answered the current mayor Sergei Antashev. “My position is to abandon the construction of inserts. Instructions have been given, we’ll sort it out. There will be budget funds or non-budget funds, or we can attract a developer. We are looking for options.”

But there are so many such “insert” houses in the city. But before you build them, you need to calculate a lot. Don't chase short-term savings. After all, it is obvious that they can bring problems and dangerous problems.

The practice of so-called spot construction leads to irreparable negative consequences, destruction of load-bearing and enclosing structures of nearby houses as a result of soil settlement due to the heavy load of objects under construction.

Do you have such “insert” houses in your city?! And did they have similar problems?!

“It seemed like an earthquake had started,” people later admitted. It turned out that at the level of the 4th and 5th floors, the facing brick burst along the entire length of the wall.

Construction defect?

This residential building was built in 2009, the base is a monolith, the cladding is brick. According to townspeople, the outer surface began to crumble a long time ago: covered up cracks are visible throughout the building, and several bricks are missing from the wall at one of the entrances.

Our house is not very good,” says local resident Irina Stepanova. - There is always a crackling sound somewhere, pipes are leaking, the seams on the ceiling are flooded from heavy rains. And audibility is impossible! When the emergency happened on May 13, we were at home. They jumped in horror. We looked out the window, and below people were shouting: “Run out quickly, the house is cracked!”

Employees from various services arrived at the scene. They examined the wall and reported that there was no likelihood of collapse.

Everyone was allowed to return to their apartments, but we continue to live in fear,” Irina shares her experiences.

The commission made a preliminary conclusion: the facing layer of the brick suffered from a hidden construction defect. Probably a microcrack was left on the façade. Air accumulated in it, which led to the “shooting” of the brick cladding.

If this version is confirmed, construction company will have to be punished for poor quality work. However, representatives of the developer do not agree with this version and believe that the residents who were making repairs in one of the apartments may be to blame for the collapse.
- Perhaps the fact that no expansion joint- said Alexey Gunin, a representative of the development company. “Somewhere the ceiling came out, and in that place the tension appeared. As for the cladding that does not rest on the monolith, an examination was passed on this decision. In the early 2000s they did this to make it more beautiful. But the method turned out to be not very successful, and now it is not used.

Photo: AiF / Artem Kurtov

Save on everything

This is not the first time facades have collapsed in relatively new high-rise buildings. So, a year ago in a house on Solidarity Avenue, 21, bldg. 3, part of the wall collapsed facing bricks. The reason was renovation work on the 13th floor. Tiles also began to crumble in houses No. 2 and 6 on Nepokorennykh Avenue. Employees of the State Construction Supervision Service came to the conclusion that the developer used low-quality materials during construction.

Experts are confident that none of the new buildings are immune from such troubles. Quality rests entirely with the developers. The latter, as a rule, save on materials. They use cheap hollow bricks for cladding, the floors are filled with concrete, which begins to crack, and the most short-lived sewer and water pipes are purchased. As a result, after 5-10 years, residents of new buildings face serious problems. This is what happened on Pulkovskaya Street.

Residents of building 55 building 3 on Moskovsky Avenue reported that they did not have time to move into the new social housing under the resettlement program, how the walls in their apartments began to crack. A 29.ru correspondent looked into the new building and found out what else the new residents were concerned about.

“I miss my apartment on Badigina”

House 55 building 3 on Moskovsky Avenue was built quite quickly. In total, it has two entrances and 80 apartments. All of them are intended for citizens whose previous housing was recognized as unsafe and subject to demolition before January 1, 2012. In the new building, all apartments are one- and two-room, which makes it possible to provide separate housing for displaced people. Residents joke that the city authorities were not in such a hurry to help them as they were to report to Moscow on the results of the resettlement program. Be that as it may, they left their dilapidated wooden houses and have now moved into comfortable apartments, but they are still dissatisfied.

The entrances are dark, there is construction debris and the elevators do not work, but residents are more concerned about another fact - recently the walls in the apartments began to become covered with cracks. The largest of them go from the floor to the ceiling. This is the situation in Tamara Stepanovna’s apartment.

There are many such cracks in every room, the largest - from floor to ceiling

We were very surprised that there were cracks in the walls in the kitchen, in the hallway, and in the rooms,” she comments. - We don’t know how to start cosmetic repairs, what to expect next? This is the social housing we have been dreaming about since 2010. We lived on Badigina, our house was declared unsafe, but you know, I sincerely miss my apartment. It had a convenient layout. Large rooms. And here they are tiny, but there is a gigantic corridor. These are, of course, trifles. Cracks and water supply are alarming - hot water It runs fine, but the cold one barely flows.

Tamara Stepanovna says that neighbors from the sixth floor complained that their windows not only started to crack, but also burst.

Everything is done on the ball, say the residents. - The house was built in a year, on marshy area. It was hastily cobbled together from what was there, and now it is bursting at the seams.

Cracks appeared in apartments not only on the first floor, like Tamara Alekseevna’s, but throughout the entire building, for example, on the sixth floor

People were forcibly moved from the center to Galushino

Several such houses have been built on Galushino, where people are being resettled from dilapidated and dilapidated housing. There are still few residents in building 55 building 3 - this is evidenced by the empty parking lot and the silence when the doorbell rings.

The house was built extremely quickly, even the box was assembled in an emergency mode, not to mention interior decoration, - comments on the situation Alexey Vorobyov, Chairman of the Board of the Arkhangelsk Regional social movement“Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights” - social networks are already full of panic messages about walls cracking and window blocks bursting in their brand new apartments. As we noticed, cracks do not occur everywhere, but only on specific floors. We are not builders, we cannot draw conclusions, but we are concerned about the situation. Spring will come - the soil will float, there are fears that everything will be even worse. We have information that needs to be verified that the slabs in this house were not knitted, that is, they were not fastened together during assembly.

It is interesting that some families are settled there practically by force, - this is confirmed by Alexey Vorobyov, who represents the interests of one of these Arkhangelsk residents in court.

View at the entrance

They literally tried to force people to settle there,” he says. - And there are a lot of questions - both about the area and about the surcharge. Everything is not as simple as it seems to people from the outside. There are citizens who are not happy with such a “gift” from the authorities.

Tamara Alekseevna, whom we met at the first entrance, also remembers without joy how her family found out about the move.

We received a summons to evict from old apartment, although there hasn’t been a word about new housing yet,” says Tamara Alekseevna. - We came to court. They ask us - why don’t you move out? We were surprised: “Where?” We went there for two months, and in the end we were told to hand over the keys to the apartment on Badigina. Where to sleep? On the street? As a result, they invited us to hand over the keys to new apartment. So we forcibly moved out - from the center to Galushina.

Not all residents are disappointed with the new house; there was an optimist in the yard:

I am a builder by profession; in the summer I will close the cracks myself - it’s not critical,” he says. - The foundation will move like any house. The ground will thaw in the spring, and the building will settle, and cracks will spread throughout the house! This is fine. No need to panic.

According to the housing and communal services portal of the Arkhangelsk region, deficiencies in construction and finishing works identified during settlement will be eliminated by the contractor and management company according to residents' statements. Specialists from the Department of Municipal Economy are also ready to participate in organizing this work.