I came across this series of houses while on a walk down Đường (Street) Chu Văn An in Quận (District) Bình Thạnh.
It is difficult in this image to figure out what is what is perfectly vertical, but it seems that the taller house on the right is mostly vertical and is holding up the three houses to the left.
What is most interesting to me is that everyone seems to be calmly living with this situation, even though the floors in the middle house must make normal balance a problem. It also seems that they might have been constructed sequentially as subsidence occurred, and they continued to work around the problem rather than starting over with a better (and more expensive, of course) foundation.
I walked through a three-story house a while back in this district that had been unoccupied for at least a year. The entire house has settled 20 centimeters from the back towards the front. The front facade wall at the ground floor had cracks from the stress, although the house structure settled uniformly rather than differentially. The ground floor, however, was very badly buckled. The owner of the house said he would clean everything up and fix it up for rental at an attractive price, but he wasn't going to be able to do anything about the settlement. In my mind, the house is a safety hazard, and I am surprised that anyone would try to rent it out.
I had heard that this district had subsidence problems due to mushy soils. All soils in the delta surrounding TP. Hồ Chí Minh are alluvial and mucky with a high water table, but this district seems to have the worst conditions judging from some rather famous construction failures (the bridge and highway approaches on Đường Nguyễn Hữu Cảhn are now being reconstructed).
