economy

The residents of Amador Heights, having been sold residential properties where many of the higher ranking US military officers who were stationed down here used to live by the former Interoceanic Regional Authority (ARI) that used the phrase "garden community" as its sales pitch, generally didn't like it when Balbina Herrera and the Housing Ministry she headed first purported to issue permits for high rises in the area notwithstanding the height restrictions in the zoning laws, then purported to change those regulations, then announced that their quiet street would be widened and all the trees would be cut down --- with an unwritten threat/promise that if they shut their mouths and didn't resist they might not be obliged to pay for the steet widening to benefit the PRD-connected developers of the Canal 360 condo towers.

The neighbors didn't shut up and the thing got into litigation, work stopped and there was a hole in the ground with a few unfinished pillars and some rubble dumped into it. But then the Supreme Court essentially overturned all zoning laws, the neighbors feared for the worst and stepped up their protests --- and the developers announced that the project was being canceled because of "zoning laws" and "increasing construction costs."

Well, maybe it dawned on them that the gringo millionaires of their imagination might not care to pay top dollar for condos adjacent to a fuel tank farm. Maybe the lack of pre-construction speculators scared off when companies had called off sales in other condo projects in order to appropriate gains that flippers thought they had made might have had something to do with it. Maybe the collapse of three "tallest building in Latin America" hypes had deflated the market.

But probably worse than all that was the tale of Le Parc Tower and the Meridian, both designed by the renowned Panamanian architect Ignacio Mallol (no multi-story underground parking on a landfill for THESE, at least) for the shadowy Spaniard Higinio Álvarez. Much to the chagrin of Lifestyles International Realty, whom Álvarez had hired to sell units in these luxury residential towers, the promoter turned out to be a "full shade" kind of guy. As in taking the money from pre-construction sales and doing a disappearing act. While other unscrupulous developers have given themselves free to cheap loans by pre-selling apartments in towers that by all indications they never intended to build, here it seems that we are dealing with outright theft and the buyers have only the dimmest prospect of getting any of their money back. The clue that the intentions were outright criminal rather than merely cutthroat came when Álvarez purported to put the lands in Obarrio where The Meridian was supposed to go and in San Francisco where Le Parc Tower was proposed on sale.

And how do we see it at The Panama News? Well, one small indication is that in the Panama UnClassified Ads section, a Yahoo group linked to this publication by which people can advertise or read ads without joining the group (see the links above or below on this page), people are starting to re-submit ads for new apartments in upscale areas of town at lowered prices. This reflects what some developers and real estate salespeople have been telling us about upper-end Panama City residential real estate for some time.

In the capital there is still a shortage of hotel rooms and there's both construction originally intended to fill that gap and the conversion of residential projects to hotels. Most of the towers under construction appear to be headed toward completion, even if they may be empty for awhile. (Then there's the money laundering factor, where the inherent economic sense of a project is beside the point, and which surely plays a role in the capital's construction boom.) Outside of Panama City there are also developer woes, generally driven by rises in building material prices and the collapse of housing prices in many parts of the USA, but business in the Interior is not nearly so affected as in the capital.