At first it sounded like another Mascot Towers. Excavation work for an underground car park has resulted in cracks in a neighbouring building leading to the evacuation of its residents.

Except it isn’t an apartment block that’s suffering cracks and subsidence – it’s a little cottage – but that shouldn’t make any difference.

When you consider all the various regulation hoops you must jump through, for instance, just to put an air-conditioning unit on a balcony, surely there should have been some alarm bells ringing when the developers of an apartment block on Sydney’s Botany Road announced they were going to dig down before they built up.

This really isn’t rocket science. If you are going to dig and drill in an area that’s liable to subsidence, you have to make an informed assessment of the risks.

A child building a sandcastle knows that if you take material away, the stuff at the side will move.

The NSW Building Commissioner has stepped in and ordered work to be stopped after the neighbouring cottage was declared too dangerous for habitation. Which is great, if a little late.

But how many more of these new blocks are we going to see undermining existing structures as the frantic race to build more apartment blocks picks up pace?

There must be a point at which the authorities say, you can build there,but you can’t dig unless you stabilise the adjoining properties BEFORE a single shovel is filled with soil.

The cracks are appearing in the plan to build more housing – they shouldn’t be appearing in our existing homes too.

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