Condoning Cons and Don’ts

In the Haze of Manila’s Condominium Problem

by Bea De Guzman

The lights illuminating city skyscrapers do a tremendous job of concealing the dark spots riddled all over its body: a golden carcass. Sitting at these grandiosities’ feet is a smattering of luminosity from the headlights of SUVs stuck in traffic, phones trying and failing to book a motor taxi, and neon signages of buses just outside, ready to save the pockets of those who live in nearby provinces. When no one beyond the upper crust actually inhabits these exorbitant buildings, what actually are these ‘residential’ enclaves, then, if not glorified facades?

The seat of power since colonial times, Manila has long been a hub of opportunities. With its rapid industrialization, businessmen sought to gain leverage with condominiums. Decades later, however, these purported harbingers of progress have only exacerbated the ordinary Filipino’s struggles. Metro Manila’s condo oversupply highlights not only the failure of the condominiums’ promises, but also unearths the roots of what imposing half-baked urbanization measures to satisfy ostensible metrics of progress really costs.

Glimpsing Northern Lowlights

Centuries after the colonial era, our feudal legacies still glimmer in the cracks of the current neoliberal economy. During the Spanish period, the settlers established the sharecropper or ‘kasama’ system, wherein the wealthiest Spanish hacienderos leased their owned land to inquilinos, the mestizos and the Chinese merchants, who in turn sublet this land to the kasamas, the Filipino farmers who till the land.

This crooked system is thought to be a product of the past, but it continues to be shamelessly exercised by the country’s rural elites. Despite progressive mythologies, the urban areas fare no better. The urban kasamas may not herd livestock and harvest crops, but they maintain studios and pay rent money to their inquilinos, a diverse troupe of those with purchasing power exceeding the average Filipino’s, such as foreigners and OFW investors.

At the end of the day, though, all of them are shelling out extortionate amounts of money to pay premium prices for shoebox units that offer little return on investment.

The real stars of the show are the hacienderos, a.k.a the real estate developers, made up of a few conglomerates that forcibly grab and convert the land from the farmers’ sources of livelihoods to literal edifices of capitalism. It is no coincidence that the Philippines’ richest men, in contrast to the contemporary tech billionaires of the West, are real estate tycoons. Land ownership is still the primary way that the ruling class of the country controls its population.

Sprawling malls, gated subdivisions, condominium buildings, and even entire cities are held by the elites who remain unchecked due to the politicians on their payrolls — their titanium hold over the market dependent on the state’s repression of its people. Falling in line with the simple law of supply and demand is less of a priority than ensuring that only those they deem worthy enough could live in their properties.

The rest of us are trivial details they steamroll like tarmac.

Chasing Western Shadows

Economic struggles and housing crises are not exclusive to the Philippines. Globally, developed countries are facing rising costs of rent and mortgage. San Francisco, the center of technological innovation, has tens of thousands of unhoused people, and so does New York City, nicknamed capital of the world, the very picture that comes to mind when one thinks of the city life. Meanwhile, these cities house the wealthiest people on the planet who could end homelessness with a wire transfer if they wanted to.

In response, many who feel disadvantaged by the staggering wealth disparity flock to countries where they can get more of their money’s worth. Case in point: the Philippines.

While diversity encourages a culture of open-mindedness, it cannot be understated that the migration of relatively wealthier foreigners come hand-in-hand with the barricading of Filipinos’ capacities to live in urban areas. Property values have shot up as businessmen take advantage of the dollar. Aside from the Westerners, the Chinese, who have capitalized on offshore gaming operators, are willing to pay lofty rent prices as they rake cash from their gambling hubs. Even amidst the POGO ban, condos remain unaffordable for the Filipino masses as the housing bubble continues to blow up in boundless greed.

Despite hosting workplaces for thousands of Filipinos, the country’s most developed cities are deliberately designed to cater to foreign tastes, whether for tourists or prospective buyers. Streets and establishments are made with lifeless choices, a portrait of neutral colors and straight lines, far from the colors and trinkets of the typical Filipino home.

This banality extends to the typical condo culture, one built on conformity and restraint. In condos, there are no spontaneous fiesta invites nor random spaghetti from a neighbor’s birthday, and certainly no knocking on someone’s door to ask if they have extra salt. For a culture built on bayanihan, the modern Manileño has become an individualist, a byproduct of the profit-driven, West-centric lifestyle that the condo encourages.

Dimming Southern Voices

Behind the glitz and glamor lies the true state of urbanization in the country. For being the richest region in the Philippines, Metro Manila has 4 million people living in slums or experiencing homelessness. Concealed by the bright lights that line the financial districts and their towering condos are hundreds of slums, stacked atop each other, their makeshift roofs of corrugated iron barely able to hang a single bulb. Cardboard sleeping mats surround the streets for those who cannot even live in the slums, the broken streetlights serving as their solace in the shadows of the night.

Before the concrete is even mixed, condominiums are not only inaccessible but actively disadvantageous to the poor, leaving them displaced by landowners and developers. Thousands are evicted every year, from informal settlers to tenants who can no longer pay, leaving them nomads in a perpetual state of disarray. Some are relocated near sewers, some near garbage dumps, and some are not relocated at all.

According to law — and even the tenets of basic empathy — developers cannot forcibly remove people without proper relocation sites. Yet, the devil will stop at nothing to get what it wants. The phenomenon of frequent fires happening among informal settlements only to be replaced by high-rise condos have sparked enough smoke to deduce that they are no mere accidents, but cheap, inhumane methods of clearing lots.

Despite its promises of progress, misgoverned urbanization is not only the cause of people’s displacement, but the root of urban poverty. Prioritizing urban areas as the sole stronghold of the country’s economic opportunities led to rural migration, which jump-started the housing crisis once it blew up the metropolitan population. Yet despite the promise of a job, a single square meter in these business districts likely costs more than said job’s annual pay, leaving many betrayed by their search for a better life.

Filipinos are trapped in a depressing paradox: cannot make money if you do not live in Manila, cannot live in Manila if you make no money.

Clearing Eastern Skylines

The condo oversupply is a legitimate crisis, but not because the lack of demand fails to line any pockets. There is a demand for housing — the fact that it comes from those who cannot afford it does not make this demand any less. It is a crisis for the masses, their whole lives malleable to the whims of the powerful few in boardrooms and government seats.

A certain billionaire-slash-politician once remarked that housing projects involving condos cannot possibly fly simply because they are “not for the poor.” Our leaders cannot even dream a full dream, one where people’s basic human rights are prioritized over making profit, where the more important question is if their citizens are safe and sheltered instead of whether or not they can pay for a decent roof over their heads.

Above all, it is a crisis that points to the bigger problem: that the majority of Filipinos cannot afford the capitalist Western markers of progress that we are so desperate to mimic.

Is the existence of Tesla charging stations, despite 1.8 million Filipino families still having no access to electricity, progress? Is the presence of million-peso high-rise condominiums, despite some 70 million Filipinos still living in substandard housing, progress? The rural areas that make up the majority of the archipelago — does leaving them behind in the tainted wake of urban development signify progress?

Until the waiters who serve the steaks, the cleaners who keep our so-called global cities pristine, and the rest of the population that keeps Manila’s lights on can live here, then the gleam of progress is no more than an overpriced hallucination of the ruling class, entranced in the haze of their daydreams built on everyone else’s nightmares.