How to drive investments away from Cebu City
I have been going around meeting people, and their first question is when the Ayala Center Cebu will open. Well, we heard that Ayala would open today. That should be good news for people whose weekly lifestyle means meeting friends or staying loose in the shops in Ayala. This weekend is the Sinulog weekend, which means we just can’t go to the other shopping malls because of many road closures. So going to the Ayala would be a must.
The other issue people are taking about is the proposal of Mayor Tomas Osmeña to limit the height of buildings to be constructed in Cebu City to only four stories high (sic). I have yet to meet someone who agrees with Mayor Osmeña that this is a good idea. Everyone I talked too believes that the mayor’s proposal would bring down real estate investments in Cebu City.
I expect that the Chamber of Real Estate and Builders Associations Inc. (CREBA) and the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry Inc. (CCCI) would issue their respective statements against the mayor’s proposal.
As the mayor said, he has put on hold 31 construction permits. This means putting on hold potential jobs in the construction industry. One medium-rise development would need at least 300 construction workers, most of whom live in the poverty level. These are people who live on a day-to-day basis. You cannot tell them that you have to wait until July if and when the mayor might approve the building permit of those buildings.
In short, the people who have to suffer because of the whims and caprices of Mayor Osmeña are not the rich developers, but those folks from the squatter areas hired to work in the construction of their buildings. As for the developers, those who already bought properties so they could build their medium-rise or high-rise buildings would just have to wait until the next elections and hope that Mayor Osmeña won’t get elected. Mind you, Mayor Osmeña is no longer invincible as he can no longer boast that he is an undefeated mayor because former mayor Michael Rama already defeated him two elections before.
But the biggest loser in Mayor Osmeña’s proposal is Cebu City because many projects that would have benefited Cebu City have been put on hold. For instance, in his fight against the SM Prime Holdings, a company that runs 67 shopping malls in the entire country including SM Seaside and SM City, they have put on hold Cebu’s version of the MOA Arena, which will have 16,000-seating capacity. Then the SMX would be the Convention Center that Cebu City sorely lacks. If you Google this, you would read Cebu SMX & Arena coming in 2017. It is already 2018 and we only get to see drawings of these projects, which SM could have built in a jiffy.
Mind you, these projects were put on hold when Mayor Osmeña won back the mayor’s seat. But with his new proposal to limit future developments to only four stories high, I’m sure that many developers would also put on hold their future projects. My good friend, Jose “Joe” Soberano, just took over a huge piece of property, which is a stone’s throw from the residence of Mayor Osmeña. Surely, he would have to rethink what building plans he has in mind for his new project.
I’m pretty sure that JG Summit of John Gokongwei must also be knocking his head why he allowed himself to be lured by Mayor Osmeña to plunk in P18 billion for the eight-hectare land, which used to be the Kawit Island that is now part of the South Road Properties (SRP). We saw his colored perspective held by no less than Mayor Osmeña himself and many of those proposed buildings are high- and medium-rise buildings. Pray tell me, would John Gokongwei invest P18 billion if he were told that he could only build a four-story building? I don’t think so.
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