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A man walks past an apartment building in Huangpu District, which appears to be supported by wooden struts. [Shanghai Daily]

Seventeen wooden supports were erected against the side of an apartment building in Shanghai's Huangpu District yesterday, apparently to stop it from falling over.

The building on Yongnian Road is not slated for demolition, however, an official told Shanghai Daily.

The exterior of the building, which dates back to 1929, is peppered with large cracks.

The Huangpu government said there have been cracks in it since last year.

Another official said the situation is being monitored on a daily basis and that some action will probably be taken soon.

"It's like living on a ship," said resident Linda Zhang.

"We sometimes get woken in the night when the building shakes. My daughter gets afraid, particularly when she's home alone," she said.

"She told me she can feel the house moving."

Zhang said she thinks the shaking is due to the pile drivers being used on the construction sites across the road.

She pointed out several cracks in the walls of her apartment, some of them so large that it is possible to see through into the room next door.

The first cracks appeared in 2010 when a subway station was being built nearby, Zhang said.

"But it's got a lot worse since then," she said.

Another resident, surnamed Huang, said her ceiling collapsed last month.

"It was about midnight," she said.

"All of the dust that had piled up over a decade fell down on my son's bed, while he was sleeping in it," she said.

"It was terrifying."

Huang said that the local housing management authority offered to renovate the ceiling for them.

"We moved into a hotel for a while and just moved back in last week," she said.

The two construction sites opposite to the affected residential building belong to Zhonghai Group and CapitaLand, according to information written on signs outside the sites.

A worker at the Zhonghai site, who declined to give his name, said "the underground part of CapitaLand's project" is deeper than the one he is working on.

"We handed our ground sedimentation report to the authorities, and everything was within the reference range," he said.

Shanghai Daily tried to reach the project manager of the CapitaLand site, but he didn't answer the phone.

In December, the district's construction and management agency, Yongye Group, which is responsible for the maintenance of public housing in Huangpu, and the Dapuqiao Neighborhood Committee, held meetings on the issue and spoke to the operators of the construction sites.

A resident surnamed Feng told Shanghai Daily that she hopes the building will be demolished.

"It would be better if we were relocated," she said.

"There's no point in renovating the building, it's too old. If they fix one problem, something else will go wrong," she said.

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