Tuesday, October 10, 2007 Osmeña: The SRP dilemma By Antonio V. Osmeña Estatements
IN practice, the terms “subdividing” and “de-veloping” are used interchangeably. Professionally, however, the application of these terms differs significantly.
Cebu City, which owns the South Road Properties (SRP), should now be transparent in informing the people whether the SRP is for subdividing or for development. There are owners, operators and speculators, for instance, who are interested only in the less intricate business functions of acquiring tracts of land at wholesale and selling them —subdivided— at retail.
There are others who are interested in going far beyond this initial stage of urbanization and seek to assume business functions that involve the creation of an entire development as well as the building of “living” areas that can effectively integrate with the surrounding civic and cultural environments.
Literally interpreted, subdividing merely means the “breaking-up” of one or more large tracts of land into smaller sites or plots, subject to community regulations, if any, governing the use of the land for which it may be offered for sale or lease.
Where subdividing is the owner’s intent, he need not incur any additional expenses other than those incident to purchase or reclaiming cost and survey of the land, to place the markers or stakes at intended plot boundaries and to submit a surveyor’s “plat” of the proposed subdivision for city official’s approval.
The SRP is comprised of pond “A” with a land area of 886,528 square meters, Pond “B” (799,346 square meters), Pond “C” (80,490 square meters), Pond “D” (1,106,005 square meters), and Kawit Island. The total land area exclusive of Kawit Island is 2,872,367 square meters.
Whenever land improvements are carried out at the SRP in accordance with subdivision plans and expenditures are made to provide essential site facilities, the field actions are appropriately classified as land developing. The process of developing is ordinarily far more comprehensive in its scope than that of subdividing and requires huge expenditures, in excess of those represented by the purchase price of the “raw” land or reclamation cost.
Assuming that SRP will undergo further land developing, 861,710 square meters would be allocated for the road network exclusive of the area needed for the sewerage treatment plant.
When land developing is completely done in accordance with community growth, SRP will have a net saleable area of 2,010,657 square meters worth P40 billion, less the developing costs.
For developing, to be socially, politically, and economically successful, should be practiced only by the well informed – by people who are acquainted with community space requirements, population and real estate market trends, community growth and growth patterns, and the absorption rate at which building sites in new formed subdivision can be sold profitably.
The developing cost is now the tricky part in the success of the project. The effective planning and execution of the SRP requires detailed study and the application of the combined skills of urban planners, architects, civil engineers, real estate consultants and financiers, all cooperating in the project which must merit the sanction of respective government agencies.
Subdividing as the first step in the development program requires the application of the economic concept of highest and best land use in the area as a whole and to each site under development.
Hopefully, Mayor Tom Osmeña, the Cebu City Council and City Hall consultants will find a way to shield the SRP from future political interference and make it an honest-to-goodness business for constituents.
Real estate speculators are just waiting for the collapse of the SRP, similar to the north reclamation project in which political interference brought down the price of land at P10 per square meter. The north reclamation project, after over three decades, has become a blighted area instead of a “city within a city” as conceptualized by then Mayor Serging Osmeña Jr.
