Wednesday, February 05, 2014

The Christchurch rebuild.

Can Cera handle the Christchurch rebuild?

The rebuild has already happened in commercial terms.

The New CBD (the Sydenham/Addington/Middleton/Riccarton/Hornby/Airport arc, plus the block bounded roughly by Victoria St/Cambridge Tce/Avon River/BealeyAve ) are all humming away.

And, fairly precisely, because they don't have the CCDU and CERA trying to micro-manage these areas.

No commercial enterprise that's survived (and thanks to the Old CBD debacle, some have not) is terribly eager to get back to the Old CBD, and pay 40-150% more in rent.

So that leaves the Precincts as a Government-dominated area: Health, Education, Justice, IRD etc. There will, of course, be ancillary businesses around: lawyers and maybe accountants, and anyone else whose revenue streams flow primarily from the taxpayers generous teat.

And there will, inevitably, be the hospitality and tourism sectors, and with the establishments which seek to scratch the itches that that combination of Government drones, tourists, convention-goers etc, will have.

But the real commercial pulse of the city beats elsewhere...and has done for three years.

It's just taken the clueless empire-builders this long to notice.....

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