“Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone / They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”
Joni Mitchell sang it half a century ago, but Cebu is now living the lyric.
As floods swallowed streets and homes following the onslaught of Typhoon Tino, all eyes turned uphill—to The Rise at Monterrazas, a luxury development built into the city’s fragile slopes, and to its poster boy, engineer-turned-influencer Slater Young.
The “Pinoy Big Brother” heartthrob turned, err, model of mindful modernity, built his brand on vision and virtue. His Monterrazas was meant to highlight this. Billed as sustainable architecture with a conscience, the place is supposedly where nature and design coexisted in perfect balance. But when torrential rains unleashed a muddy catastrophe on the lowlands, questions came rolling down faster than the floodwaters.
Was the project partly to blame?
And why, in the face of disaster, has its creator gone silent?
Young’s social media, once a stream of feel-good optimism, has gone eerily quiet. Comments are restricted, posts untouched.
The silence has grown so loud that peers in the entertainment world are filling the void.
Actor Albie Casiño slammed the lack of response, saying, “You can’t build a brand around responsibility and then hide when things get real.”
Entrepreneur Joanna Lhuillier urged, “We need accountability, not aesthetics.”
Even Jacques Branellec of Jewelmer shared harrowing storm footage, calling for “climate consciousness from the top down.”
It’s not just Cebu’s hills that are eroding, but the fragile trust between image and integrity.
Young may have built The Rise but right now, what’s rising fastest beyond floodwaters, is the demand for answers.
