How did Ayala Land manage to have a joint venture agreement (JVA) with the National Housing Authority (NHA) to develop the North Triangle area into a business district? That’s government property, and the law mandates the conduct of a public bidding before it can be assigned to a private developer. Was such a bidding held? If it was an unsolicited proposal by Ayala, was it subjected to a Swiss challenge by other developers, as the law requires? The task of the NHA is to provide housing for the poor. Why has it entered into a deal to construct expensive commercial, residential, and business buildings for the rich in the remaining open space in Metro Manila?
These were among the questions raised by Representatives Lito Atienza and Jonathan de la Cruz at the Kapihan sa Manila at the Diamond Hotel last Monday. The other guests at the forum were officers of the Manila Seedling Bank Foundation (MSBF) led by its chair, Lucito Bertol, who narrated to the journalists how policemen and employees of the Quezon City government, on orders of Mayor Herbert Bautista and City Administrator Vic Endriga, forcibly and illegally demolished the administration building and gardens at the Environment Center on Quezon Avenue and Agham Road despite their protests.
I would like to emphasize that the MSBF and its gardeners are not squatters although the Environment Center is surrounded by squatters. The MSBF has a 50-year usufruct on the 7-hectare property owned by the NHA, which still has 14 years to go. But to give the impression that they are squatters, the city government also demolished squatter shanties on Agham Road nearest the Center but spared those farther away from it.
The MSBF was formed to produce seedlings for the government’s reforestation program and plants and vegetable seeds for home gardeners. Through the years, the Center served as an oasis for city dwellers trapped by the encroaching concrete jungle. Now the last green lung of the metropolis is gone.
The North Triangle area, bounded by North, South (Timog), East and West Avenues, was envisioned by city planners to be the central park of Quezon City. It was to be similar to New York’s Central Park, London’s Hyde Park, Paris’ Bois de Bolougne, and Rome’s Villa Borghese, among others. But one after another, national administrations assigned parts of it to government buildings and private subdivisions. The Veterans Memorial Medical Center, Philippine Children’s Hospital, Lung Center, and Kidney Center are there. Part of the Kidney Center compound was almost sold to SM a couple of years ago, but the deal was scuttled because of protests from the public. The last remaining parks are the pocket Ninoy Aquino Wildlife Center, which the QC government also tried to grab, and the Quezon Memorial Park, which is also rapidly becoming a concrete jungle.
For some reason, private developers have been able to build giant shopping malls in the North Triangle. There are now four of them there—SM City, The Block, Ayala’s Trinoma, and Lucio Tan’s Eton, with more coming up.
The malls have generated enormous traffic jams on all the streets surrounding and leading to the North Triangle. The Elliptical Road, from which seven avenues radiate, is choked with traffic at all hours of the day in spite of the two flyovers on Edsa (over Quezon Avenue and Kamuning Road) and the underpass on Quezon Avenue. Imagine how much more traffic the planned central business district would attract. It would be hell on earth. Residents in the area are opposing the plan because the traffic would trap them inside and outside their homes. It would be very difficult for them to go to work in the morning and return home in the evening.
Ayala, which has not been able to solve the traffic jams at its Ayala Center in Makati City, has not come up with a plan to ease the traffic at the North Triangle.
Does Quezon City need another business district? No. There are business centers in Makati, in the Global City, in the Ortigas and Araneta centers. We do not need another.
Representatives Atienza and De la Cruz said they would introduce bills in the House to impose a moratorium on the construction of shopping malls in developed areas such as Metro Manila. In other countries, they said, malls are situated in undeveloped sites far away from the downtown areas. In the Philippines, it is the malls that generate traffic jams. Look at the streets surrounding the malls, they said: These are all choked with traffic. The two congressmen also said they would likewise file a bill to preserve the North Triangle as a park, as it was originally envisioned.
With the exception of Manila, which has the Rizal Park, all the other cities in Metro Manila have none of comparable size. For its size, Quezon City should have a bigger park, but it is now known as the squatter capital of the Philippines—and City Hall wants to turn the last remaining open space into another concrete jungle. Atienza and De la Cruz, who seem to be among the more intelligent members of Congress, are asking environmentalists and the general public to support efforts to preserve the last lung of the metropolis.
Ask residents what they think are the biggest problems in their cities and they will answer: pollution and traffic, apart, of course, from crime and graft. Parks cleanse the air of the pollution that the people and their vehicles spew out every day. Parks absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Remove the parks and it would be like removing the lungs in humans—and humans will die.