Serendipitously, our article which came out on Wednesday last week was followed by the president going to the former Clark Air Base facility in Pampanga, where he predicted that Manila will be a “dead city” in 25 years.
Last Wednesday’s article, entitled “Urban decay” was about how the once “royal and noble city” beside the Pasig River has transmogrified through decades of neglect into an almost unlivable mess. And when I speak of Manila, I refer to most of Metro Manila as well, north and south of the Pasig.
To be sure, the decay is principally attributable to three major causes: One, the unbridled growth of our population (105 million residing in an archipelagic geography of a mere 30 million hectares); Two, the Urban Land Reform Act during President Cory Aquino’s time where “bleeding hearts” in government goaded by the numerous Church virtually legalized squatting on both public and private land; and three, the lack of any forward urban planning.
According to DoTr and MMDA, the two national government agencies most distressed (and that adjective is an understatement) by the un-planned urbanization of our NCR, there are some 8 million to 9 million residents living here, which balloons at daytime to 14 to 15 million. The so-called “daytime” population refers to those who come to the metropolis but reside in other provinces, mostly Cavite, Laguna, Batangas in the south and Bulacan, Bataan and Pampanga in the north.
Even describing them as “daytime” transients has become a misnomer. Most nights they are still trapped in the horrendous traffic that we have come to live by each unspeakable day.
Because most jobs are available only in the NCR area, everybody is “compelled” by microeconomic realities to come to the “big city”. The result was predictable decades ago, as architect and urban planning specialist Jun Palafox rues. Big apple is rotting. And rot cannot be made fresh.
Which probably drove a Davaoeno now living in the palace beside the stinking river Pasig state that Manila will be “dead” in another 25 years.
I have lived in Manila since I was five years old, when we transferred from San Pablo City in Laguna (which has also become an ugly mess, by the way) to an apartment owned by wealthy relatives at the corner of Azcarraga and Magdalena (now Claro M. Recto and Masangkay).
I have seen with my own eyes and smelled with my own nose the slow rot that my city has degenerated into.
President Duterte has proclaimed it to be a dying city. So let it be.
Requiescat in pace. Rest in peace?
The first step, and the opportunity is now, with a president like Duterte is to jumpstart plans for the transfer of the national government to a place like Clark or its surrounding hillsides. Imelda Marcos once thought of Tanay, the valley ensconced between the Sierra Madre and Antipolo. But that is too close, and the infrastructure requirements are too expensive.
So Clark, methinks, should be it. Seventy kilometers away, connected by the SCTEX, is a deep port, Subic, once America’s naval base in the South China Sea. And Clark is itself an international airport, so basically, the infrastructure is already in place. All these major hubs need is modernization, and there are enough funds, both government and private, which are available.
It has enough land, some 40,000 hectares of it, of which more than 9,000 hectares BCDA’s team of Greg Garcia and Vince Dizon, in tandem with CDC’s Ping de Jesus and Noel Manankil are fast-tracking into a new Green and Global City.
How much land does a national government center need? Look at it this way: all of the present Bonifacio Global City (where former BCDA executives and the private developers who “developed” The Fort could have allocated more parks and open spaces and controlled the drive for rental profits) is some 160 hectares.
Tame the height of the skyscrapers to mid-rise buildings for the use of national government agencies properly clustered in an area replete with parks and green spaces, and you could fit the entire national government bureaucracy in a thousand hectares.
Consider further that many government agencies rent their office spaces. Why, even the Senate of the “august” twenty-four are mere tenants of GSIS. Now they want to move to another part of The Fort.
DTI and DoT lease buildings in Makati. DoTr used to rent a building in Ortigas and now rents in Clark, the first to move out of NCR. The Department of Education retro-fits in what was once an Imelda sports-cum-cultural enclave in the rolling hills of Pasig. DoH is squeezed into a hospital complex. DA, DENR, and DAR are in the Quezon Circle complex, but many of its attached agencies are tenants in privately-owned buildings.
Have you been to the Department of Justice, or the RTCs of Manila? Weep at the congestion. See how formerly high-ceilinged storeys have been retro-fitted to include mezzanines where only employees five feet high can stand erect.
Through the years, both Congress and Malacanang have created more and more agencies, commissions, offices, task forces, whatever, ostensibly to “serve the people better”, or make “government closer to the public”. To do so, the national government has had to lease space more and more, paying exorbitant rents.
President Quezon’s vision of a government center in the eastern hills which became a “new” city named after him has not come to fruition. The national government is still a dispersed lot.
There is no other lasting solution but to transfer the national government elsewhere, and begin the process of bringing a certifiably “dead” city back to life. (To be continued)