Public housing and Mega Cebu

As Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama prepares for yet another politically willed widening of the streets of the section of Lorega that was devoured in flames recently, it may help to ponder on the potentials of a public property like the cemetery there and how to go about creating a pocket of successful and enlivened public housing.

The Philippines is somewhat bereft of success stories in urban poor public housing that, over the generations, grow into vibrant communities devoid of the ills that seem to always accompany such types of housing: crime and drugs.

We always seem to create housing for the poor that miss on a number of elements that make for success stories. Sometimes a public housing scheme has all the beautifully colored houses but it has no regular water utility service. At other times, there are urban poor housing facilities with unpaved streets that turn into water troughs and canals during a heavy downpour.

Worse, there are urban poor housing projects that are so far away from the nearest highway that they fail to pass the test of logic. Then there are those that are constructed under the cloud of corruption that they end up so substandard that only the brave and the desperate dare to live in them.

In the early 1990s, I had worked briefly with Dr. Erhard Berner at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. We surveyed the urban housing situation in Cabantan and Barrio Luz, just as Ayala Center Cebu was starting to develop out of the old Club Filipino de Cebu golf courses adjacent to these communities.

One thing that struck me then was how much spread-out the housing situation in these two contiguous areas had been. They still are up to now, such that when fire hits the area, it spreads quickly and with much ferocity.

In the mid-2000s I had the opportunity to visit Singapore for a few months on scholarship. There I saw for the first time the high-rise public housing system that the British first developed in the 1950s which was continued when Lee Kuan Yew took over in the early 1960s. Already by 2006, thousands of housing units built by the Singaporean government had sprouted all over the city-state, on buildings that could rise to 12 floors complete with elevators. Each of these buildings had kept the ground floor empty of tenants.

These were called void decks and one could see the entire footprint of the building. There would normally be about four to six similar buildings, all with void decks dedicated to events like weddings, wakes, parties etc.

The marvelous thing about all these was that pressure on land was reduced to a minimum because instead of spreading housing up in the hills with one or two-story houses spoiling the horizon, Singapore had instead located these houses right within the confines of the city proper, putting 200 to 300 families under one building that had a foot print of only about 900 to 1,500 square meters, much like the oh-so expensive condominiums we see sprouting all over the city today.

With much land to spare, every public housing project in Singapore had a park facing all four or six buildings. Each park had beside it a gym-like structure that housed a public market as well as the famed street food hawkers that Singapore had now placed under one roof. There were also spaces for associations and neighborhood groups.

All these created contained but vibrant communities.

Imagine turning Cabantan and Barrio Luz into such experiment at medium-rise public housing. Will it work?

There are issues that of course make success in Singapore turn to failure in the Philippines. The most important is, without doubt, the level of corruption that permeates almost every nook and cranny in this country. Rodolfo Alix of the Movement for a Livable Cebu asked me last week how a mass vertical public housing system like the one I just mentioned above would work in the Philippines or in Cebu for that matter in the midst of the so-called “SOP”, the country’s euphemism for a percentage here and a percentage there of the actual budget taken out to line the pockets of unscrupulous politicians or government functionaries. At least for Cebu City the problem is not corruption but where to find money to finance such a project.

I proposed one solution that I hoped would be explored by the Mega Cebu group that is now mulling the development of the metropolitan region of Cebu. Instead of government having to spend on such medium-rise housing, why not pay it forward? It is big business that will immediately reap the harvest of a planned and livable Mega-Cebu so why not ask business leaders to build public housing a la Singapore and then, once constructed and ready for occupancy, government pays the group. It’s called build-transfer-operate scheme or BTO, I think.

This is the international financial world’s gizmo for getting the private sector to pay forward because presumably there is less corruption there or there is less ambiguity and self-interest that drives corruption in public housing the way it does all over the public world.

BTO can also be pursued for things like a mass transit system comprising trains that link medium-rise mass housing projects to the work areas. But, given the nearness of so much public land now occupied horizontally by urban poor communities to the urban core, transportation is the least of the problem. I believe it is time to explore the potentials of vertical housing projects, putting say 800 families of Cabantan into four 12-story housing project complete with amenities.

There will be lifestyle changes that result in vertical living. One can no longer raise pigs to prepare for fiesta. One can no longer wash laundry and hang it out on the streets to dry. But, hey, those are easy to change. What is most difficult is political will. And Mayor Michael Rama is not the kind that lacks the will to make things better.

It is time, Mayor, for a medium-rise public housing in Lorega, one that will be a success story finally for this country. Get the private sector to end the talk about all these urban planning projects and start working with you to really build one showcase that everyone can finally say, Cebu is indeed like Singapore!