Who Do We Blame?

8/14/2019 Who Do We Blame?

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Map 1. The 1941 Frost Plan for Quezon City compared to a satellite image of actual land use. Notethe green protected area stretching from the Batasan area (military academy on the plan) all the way

to Libis. The area shown in Map 2 is indicated by the red dots.

Map 2. Actual land use northeast of the UP Diliman campus. Note that in the original Frost Plan,this would have been protected parkland. Instead, it has been transformed into private subdivisions,a golf course, and slums.


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Ideally, a forested catchment basin would have prevented flash flooding by maintaining soils with ahigh absorptive capacity, but as these slopes were graded and paved over for subdivisions, theirability of the soil to retain rainwater was severely compromised.

It is definitely no coincidence that these were perhaps the worst-hit areas in all of Quezon City,where mansions built on slopes unsuitable for residential areas collapsed and entire slums drownedin floodwaters.

3.) Further upstream in the Marikina River system, this process of paving over watersheds is beingrepeated in new suburban developments in the Sierra Madre foothills of Rizal. Interestingly, at leasttwo presidential aspirants are heavily invested into this process.

Ill leave it up to you to guess who.

4.) Last but not the least, an altogether more complex problem: a well-meaning policy(3) requires

that real estate developers allocate 20% of their horizontal house-and-lot developments tosocialized housing. However, no such requirement exists for vertical condominium developments.

In addition, land prices in the metro area are ridiculously expensive for our level of economicdevelopment. Between 1975 and 1991, for example, land prices in Metro Manila grew at a pace of2.5 to 3.65 times faster than GDP per capita(4). Additionally, newly freed-up parcels (like FortBonifacio, Camp Bago Bantay and North Triangle) are typically privatized to the highest bidder.

Given the high price of acquiring urban land, the tendency for developers is to build condominiumsfor the low-risk, high-return markets of high income demographics. There is absolutely no incentive,whether through our laws or through market forces, to develop high-rise residences in the urban

core for the poor majority of the population: effectively denying them, through pricing, the right tolegally own property in the urban core.

These factors have two consequences for how Mega Manila grows, how it is built, and how it wasaffected by tropical storm Ondoy.

The first is the growth of slums in core areas. With land and condominium units effectively pricedout of their reach, there is little choice for the urban poor but to live in slums, especially as themarket creates conditions for the concentration of 44% of Metro Manilas land in the hands of thecountrys elite families.(5)

The following data demonstrates the extent to which urban poor Filipinos have been systematically

abandoned by the state and shunned by the market. We have roughly the same GDP per capita asIndonesia; however, 44% of urban Filipinos live in slums, compared to 23% of urbanIndonesians.(6)

Slum % urbanpopulation (2003)

GDP/capita(PPP$) (2008)


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Philippines 44.1 3,510

Indonesia 23.1 3,975

As the events of the past weekend show, slums are disproportionately vulnerable to natural disasters,as they are often built on marginal land and have high population densities.(7)

The second consequence is sprawl: the city grows out, rather than up. To tap demographics that arepriced out of core urban lands, as well as to meet the governments 20% socialized housingrequirement, developers opt to build house-and-lot subdivisions in the urban periphery, where landis still relatively cheap, and where old landlords are eager to dispose of properties about to besubjected to agrarian reform.

This is despite the fact that a significant proportion of land in Metro Manila are in the form of idle,vacant lots. Most neighborhoods in northern Quezon City, where I live, are patchworks of sprawlingexclusive subdivisions, slum colonies, and idle lots as land bank.

Thus, within the past two decades, Manilas metropolitan area, as defined by a population density ofat least 1,000 persons per square kilometer, has grown to become a 3,105 sq. km. monstrosity, withmuch of this growth occurring as encroachment on prime agricultural land in Bulacan, Cavite, andLaguna.(8)

This worsened the extent of this weekend's disaster by expanding the land area affected. With alarger land area to cover, transportation and communications for the relief effort was more difficult

than it should have been, and the need to coordinate between different local governments preventeda quicker response.

More importantly, most of the growth occurs in suburban and peri-urban areas that do not have theinfrastructure, manpower, and equipment to address these sorts of disasters. Keep in mind thatsome of the most hard-hit areas, such as Marilao in Bulacan, Bian in Laguna, and San Mateo,Rodriguez and Cainta in Rizal fit this description perfectly: suburban areas that have seen explosiveurbanization but did not see a corresponding improvement in infrastructure and local governmentcapacity.

We therefore end up with a city that is more prone to natural disasters than it should be, in a centurythat will likely see an out-of-whack ecosystem throwing stronger typhoons and unpredictable

monsoons at us.

Now, the hard questions.

Who do we blame for underdevelopment in the countryside? The explosive growth of Mega Manilais directly driven by rural-to-urban migration, as agriculture is no longer a viable livelihood for manyFilipinos. Who do we blame for the fact that 62.6% of Filipinos live in cities, compared to 32.5% of


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Thais?(9) Do we blame the poor for the fact that in the countryside, they are deprived of livelihoods,incomes, and education for their children?

Given our propensity to heap public anger on Jaque Bermejos and UglyYuBins, to publicly shameMikey Arroyos and Manny Villars, and to present Glorias resignation as the solution to what is mostdefinitely a persistent, structural problem, how do we, as a public, come to terms with this situation?

If its a matter of laying blame, shouldnt we also be lining up the Ayalas, the Solivens, and hell, eventhe Jesuits for developing on lands that should have been preserved as watersheds? Shouldhomeowners shoulder responsibility for creating demand for house-and-lot properties? To stretchthe blame game to the point of absurdity: should we demand an official apology from the Americansfor exporting the unsustainable house-in-the-suburbs, two-car-garage dream to our country?

And if we do, how would it help the relief efforts? How would the blame game help us arrive atsolutions?

If its a matter of pinning hopes on our politicians: would a different constitution, a different

president, a different NDCC, a different MMDA chair, and different mayors and local governmentofficials translate to substantial changes in how we build our city?

The answers to these questions, I think, are best left to a broad public debate for two reasons.

First, it would get more people thinking and working on solutions. Already, in the wide-rangingconversation generated by the original version of this essay(10), a number of potential solutions haveemerged: low-cost housing stock markets, idle land taxation, transfer of development rights, to namea few.

Second, a sustained public clamor is perhaps the only way we can get elected officials to act on acomprehensive solution. Odds are, none of the presidential and mayoral aspirants have a concrete

long-term plan for Mega Manila in the 21st century. After all, why build infrastructure that the nextmayor would get credit for? If you want to get reelected, it's much more effective to play the kasal,binyag, at libing patron than to implement a responsible long-term plan.

What the public ultimately needs to do is to create the necessary pressure on elected officials byactively utilizing democratic spaces, by making it clear to elected officials that it is in their bestinterests to uphold our best interests, as well as the best interests of future generations. Democracy,after all, is not merely a matter of holding a popularity contest every three years.

*This essay is based on a Facebook note published by the author on October 1, 2009, and on thesubsequent discussion generated by comments from other Facebook users. The author is verygrateful for the insights of the online public, especially those from Alan Cadavos, Josephine Dionisio,Andi Lacuesta, Rowie Azada-Palacios, and Jan Velasco.

**MA Sociology student, University of the Philippines Diliman. The author is currently conductingindependent research on the interplay between globalization, local political and economic elites, and21st-century urbanization in developing societies with Alvin Camba, an MA History student atUniversity of the Philippines Diliman.


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1. http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/09/30/09/govt-private-developers-liable-flood-damage

2. Quezon City Government. (2002) Comprehensive Land Use Plan.

Quezon City comprehensive land use plan

3. Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992. RA 7279

4. Banzon-Bautista, C. (1998). Culture and Urbanization: The Philippine Case. PhilippineSociological Review, 46(3-4):21-45

5. Berner, E. (1997) Defending a Place in the City: Localities and the Struggle for Urban Land inMetro Manila. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press

6. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso; World Bank (2009) World DevelopmentIndicators database(http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GDP_PPP.pdf;

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/POP.pdf)

7. Bankoff, G. (2003) Constructing Vulnerability: the Historical, Natural and Social Generation ofFlooding in Metropolitan Manila. Disasters, 27(3):224-238; p. 232

8. Jones, G. W. (2005) Urbanization, Megacities and Urban Planning Issues: The Philippines in anAsian Context. Philippine Population Review, 4(1):1-24

9. World Health Organization Statistical Information System) http://www.who.int/whosis/en/

10. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=290948210385

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Who Do We Blame?