The building industry is booming once again in Orihuela, one of the municipalities where the housing bubble exploded with disastrous consequences in 2007, after years of frenzied building, especially in the coastal area.
You would have thought that during the intervening 11 years lessons would have been learned but still with a lack of necessary services, especially on the Orihuela Costa, that appears not to have been the case.
The waste collection service is still inadequate as is the disposal of human waste human which still often result in appalling smells, sewerage spills onto roads and pathways, across the municipality.
However, the number of cranes that can be seen across the area suggests that there is still little control by the government of the construction industry where there is still the paradox of new homes being built next to abandoned housing developments, houses unsold and skeletons of buildings that were only half completed.
Indeed so far this year the City Council has authorized more than 260 new constructions.
The most recent was just last week when the Local Government Board authorised a developer to build four more apartment blocks in the Orihuela Costa, a total of 102 more homes, on Calle Gigantes y Cabezudos in Villamartin.
He said that the development model is “impossible to maintain” recalling that in 2011 there were more than 10,000 empty homes in Orihuela, according to the Valencian Institute of Statistics.
