Mexico City, Nov 23 (EFE).– Dozens of residences at a luxury development in Mexico City’s Santa Fe neighborhood, including former Miss Universe Alicia Machado’s home, are on the edge of an abyss after landslides that have led to criticism of unregulated development in the capital.

Santa Fe, a neighborhood in the borough of Cuajimalpa, is a newly developed area in the southwestern corner of Mexico City and was built over sand quarries and landfills, although its origins date to colonial times.

Over the years, Santa Fe has become a business hub and bastion of high-income residents seeking to avoid urban chaos in a metropolitan area with more than 20 million people.

The tranquility in Santa Fe, disturbed until not long ago only by the increasing traffic on thoroughfares linking the neighborhood with the downtown of the megalopolis, began to be shattered in late October by landslides apparently triggered by the weight of two huge telephone antennas built next to a house.

On Oct. 27, some 6,000 cubic meters (211,400 cubic feet) of dirt and rocks slid from a hill into the posh Vista del Campo subdivision, leaving the buildings a few meters (yards) away from tumbling into a ravine tens of meters (yards) deep.

Since then, there have been at least four more landslides and there is a danger of additional ones in a city known for its torrential rainstorms and powerful earthquakes.

So far, more than 100 residents, including the former Venezuelan beauty queen, of three of the five buildings in the complex affected by the landslides have been evacuated.

An EFE team that visited the area spotted two people on a fifth-floor balcony in a building on the edge of the abyss that should have been completely evacuated.

Attorney Juan Rivero Legarreta, who represents Vista del Campo residents and owns an apartment in the complex, said at least two families remained in the towers because “they don’t have money to go to a hotel or another house, it’s very dangerous.”

Rents in the area, according to ads on the Internet, can reach up to 45,000 pesos ($2,700) per month.

Rivero said he bought his apartment four years ago for $850,000.

“Now, nobody wants to rent or buy there. Nobody wants anything to do with it,” the attorney said. EFE