Throughout Mexico City, uninhabited buildings with gaping cracks lean at precarious angles and some displaced people are still living outdoors a year after a magnitude 7.1 earthquake killed 228 people in the capital and 141 more in nearby states.
Bureaucracy and physical and legal hurdles have delayed demolition of hundreds of tottering structures. In other cases owners carried out repairs that were purely cosmetic — masking damage that is likely to be revealed in the next quake. Corruption has continually undermined attempts to enforce building codes.
Tearing down buildings in a metropolis of 21 million is a daunting task. “It . . .
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