BRIEFS: Housing

Building collapses, injuring mother and child

Jorge Fernández/LA PRENSA

Deconstruction: There are 56 buildings in Santa Ana on the verge of collapsing, many of them inhabited by poor families.1051623

The collapse of a wall in an abandoned building, causing an adjacent building to give way and injuring two people, is just one of the dangers faced by some 5,000 families living in poverty in the Santa Ana neighborhood next to the Casco Viejo.

Lorena Migdalia Chacón, 26, and her nine-month-old daughter, Lorena Chacón, were taken to the Hospital Santo Tomás and the Hospital del Niño for treatment of the injuries they sustained after the building on Calle 15, where six families were living in constant risk, fell apart.

According to the Ministerio de Vivienda (Mivi), there are 363 condemned buildings in the city of Panama where some 24,000 people are living.

The Mivi's public relations office indicated that, according to their census, only four families were living in the building, which means two others were squatting there. Some were moved to temporary shelters and others went to stay with family.

The ministro de Vivienda, Gabriel Diez, has called on owners of vacant lots in the city to build lowcost housing on their property. “The State,” he said, “is in a position to cooperate with owners interested in building housing in the social interest, so as to relocate families living in condemned houses and then demolish them.”