Cebu Landmasters (CLI) signed an agreement with the Cebu City government to donate an in-city housing for informal cettlers of Barangay Lorega-San Miguel.

The P115-million project will have 100 units in a 1,350-square meter property and is set to be completed this 2021.

The medium-rise building tenement housing will have five stories and will be the first and tallest socialized housing project to be owned by the government in Visayas and Mindanao.

The property will be powered by solar panels. It will also have areas for residents to plant in.

While Cebu City has seen tremendous growth in both commercial and residential real estate projects in the past 20 years, it has also created inequality in terms of affordable housing for the city’s lower-income residents.

“Cebu’s urban boom, in fact, has generated a human surplus in the form of slums as workers continue to flock to our city, struggling to catch even just a bit of its economic growth and constantly facing displacement,” Mayor Edgar Labella said in his first state of the city address in 2019, after winning his first term as mayor.

Labella had promised that one of his top priorities would be to hold real estate developers accountable for allocating socialized housing for every real estate project the city approves.

The law mandates that for every condominium, 5% must go to the poor, while 15% of every subdivision must be set aside for low-income housing. Labella said then that the socialized housing must be within Cebu City and not be applied to “any random local government.”

For the most part, Labella has kept his word, with the CLI property being among the most modern and spacious of the city’s social housing projects.

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“CLI’s goal to help fill the VisMin housing gap includes well-planned projects for the marginalized,” said CLI chairman and chief executive officer Jose Soberano III. – with reports from Ryan Macasero/Rappler.com