Urban blight

Looking at Metro Manila from the window of a plane trying to land in daytime, one can’t help feeling disgusted. There are spots of modernity in the Makati, Bonifacio, Alabang, Ortigas and Bay Area. The rest is unmitigated urban blight.

Nothing looks healthy… not Laguna de Bay… not Manila Bay… not Pasig River. All are straining from the weight of pollution and overpopulation.

It is difficult to believe that the famous American urban planner Daniel Burnham actually designed Manila’s city center, the national capital center in Quezon City and Baguio City. He also designed Chicago and Washington DC.

You can barely appreciate parts of Burnham’s original plans … like Roxas Boulevard and the various neo-classical government buildings around Luneta Park, which reminds one of Washington DC.

For Baguio, it is simply disgusting. Gone are the pine trees in the mountainsides. Instead, squatter colonies have sprouted and yes, an ugly mall stands where the honeymoon hotel of my generation, aptly called Pines Hotel, once was. 

The National Artist Ben Cabrera had to buy an entire mountainside facing his studio or risk waking up daily to urban blight. Burnham Park? I don’t think Mr. Burnham will like how it looks today.

Maybe we can blame the Japanese occupation of the country and the destruction it brought to Manila for our current urban decay. Maybe people were just too busy trying to survive that they didn’t prioritize the need for a good plan to rebuild the city.

Or maybe, we simply didn’t elect competent leaders after we won our independence in 1946. Our post war history is a parade of corruption and incompetence that plagues us to this day and is visually manifested in our urban blight.

Indeed, our government through the years abandoned its role to properly plan the growth of our cities. The only good example of city planning we had over those years was done by the private sector.

It has been observed that if the late Col. Joseph McMicking didn’t start Ayala’s Makati developments, we wouldn’t have this patch of sanity and modernity today. But even here, his standards have been lowered.

We have been steadily losing patches of green open parks in the Makati Central Business area and its traffic and environmental chaos have been recreated at the Bonifacio Global City, as if it was a patented plan. The ghost of the old colonel must be in pain to see what has become of his dream.

Many of us shared the McMicking dream. This is why when an Ayala executive boasted in an interview in Singapore some years ago about how good they are in planning their developments, I for one, heartily agreed.

The Ayala executive bragged to The Business Times of Singapore that Ayala had become a de facto government essentially because of government’s lack of an urban planning or development agency. This was how the executive was quoted by the Singaporean paper:

“The fact that there is nobody in the Philippines who regulates urban planning has been great for Ayala Land, because we are probably the only company there that has the scale financially to take on large plots of land…

“By developing big tracts of land, we become the government; we control and manage everything. We are the mayors and the governors of the communities that we develop and we do not relinquish this responsibility to the government.

“But because we develop all the roads, water and sewer systems, and provide infrastructure for power, we manage security, we do garbage collection, we paint every pedestrian crossing and change every light bulb in the streets – the effect of that is how property prices have moved.” 

And how property prices have moved since that interview was given in 2014! Unfortunately, the stiff competition in the property industry made Metro Manila an even bigger sea of haphazard urbanization.

From the order and symmetry of Burnham we have become a dysfunctional Third World metropolis… the favorite of movie makers looking to depict how the veritable Gate to Hell looks and feels like. Traffic gridlock, like last Saturday’s, remains a pain in everyone’s existence.

It will only get worse. The property sector is expected to grow at an annual average of 9.8 percent from 2018 to 2026, with no credible public mass transport. Growth in the residential sector is estimated at an annual average of 10.3 percent.

The sad part is that the poor will continue to suffer homelessness. Government data estimates the country’s social housing backlog at 5.6 million units. Government has no credible strategy to address the problem and the private sector is only focused on the profitable segment of the industry.

Our metropolitan government structure guarantees there will be no unified effort to start fixing the problem. Indeed, the only real reason why I am willing to give federalism a chance is the promise to form one regional government for Metro Manila instead of the 16 cities and one town we now have. Seventeen mayors acting like kings in their fiefdom is the formula for perpetuating the mess.

A solution requires government leadership and a property sector that isn’t greedy for profits at all cost. The property industry must, on its own, construct socialized housing, not in areas far from the city jobs, but right where the squatter shanties now stand.

The National Housing Authority must stop giving away land meant for socialized housing in the city to property developers so they can build more malls, hotels and condominiums for the rich. Indeed, the NHA must stop building housing itself and ask the successful developers to do it for them.

I did not see one squatter colony, not one squatter shanty in Hanoi. We should ask them their secret.

We need to seriously start addressing the problem of urban blight. Our lives depend on it… yes even you in gated enclaves of the well-to-do.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco