Condominium, pandemonium

The Ateneo de Manila University and residents around Katipunan Road have filed a lawsuit against a previous Quezon City Council over the approval of SM Blue, a condo project. The Loyola Heights community or LHC as they are beginning to be called, one that includes Ateneo and Miriam, plus several upper-class subdivisions, alleges that the city council committed graft by allowing SM to build a 42-story condo, when current zoning regulations limit the maximum to 24 stories.

Many communities, especially in Metro Manila, are following the SM Blue case because of similar concerns in their areas. In San Juan, where I live, you will find a growing number of homes and business establishments posting tarps that read “No to High Rise.” I mention San Juan because it was here that one of the earliest Manila condominiums, Avalon, was built, yet its residents continue to have ambivalent feelings about these housing projects.

The ambivalence comes about partly because condominiums are fairly recent additions to city life. Some people see the condominiums as the epitome of modern living, engineering marvels and self-contained mini-cities where hundreds of people can share space and lives.  “Condominium” itself is derived from “com” and “dominium,” originally a legal term that meant “joint ownership or sovereignty.”

On the other end of the spectrum, there are people for whom condominiums evoke nightmares of widespread chaos within the units themselves, and in the vicinity. It is difficult, indeed, to think of how these buildings can be maintained, and how people can learn to live together in such confined spaces, karaokes blaring away, garbage in corridors, nasty neighbors breathing down one’s neck.  Rather than think of people sharing ownership of spaces, condominiums strike fear in some people’s hearts, the word mutating into a sense of living with demons—con demonyo, or worse, pandemonium, demons everywhere!

But like it or not, condos are here to stay. Our population has grown by leaps and bounds and there’s no way we can accommodate more people except by building up. Because real estate prices are so high in cities, there was really no choice for many urban families except to rent, and they were paying through their nose for the tiniest, most dismal of living spaces. Others had to move farther out of the city centers, Metro Manila metamorphosing into Mega Manila, with people sometimes having to commute three to four hours each day just to get to work and get back home.

Europe showed the way as early as the 19th century with mass housing in government-subsidized apartments. Some of our neighbors, notably Singapore and China, have followed suit, allowing people to live closer to their work places.

Ecosystems

In the Philippines, we have left much of this kind of housing to the private sector, although there’s talk now about more public-private partnerships to provide affordable condos to lower-income families. I worry about possible irregularities, like the Globe Asiatique scandal, but I am also concerned about the lack of rules and regulations around the environmental impact of the condominiums.

It is important to look at the condos themselves as ecosystems. Some time back, I wrote about visiting an upper-class condo at the height of a typhoon, its 40-plus floors functioning like a small barangay on its own and humming with activity with its own electrical supply after a typhoon.

But I know, too, that residents pay high dues to keep maintenance going, and that money was invested for all kinds of  back-up safety mechanisms.

Many other condo projects are more haphazard, and hazardous. I have seen condo complexes where buildings are constructed only three or four meters apart and where, within the buildings, 14 square meter rabbit hatches are built without windows. Matchboxes come to mind, not only because of the tiny spaces, but also because they are fire hazards, or become hazards in times of natural disasters.

All these condo ecosystems should be seen as part of a larger urban ecosystem, with varying potentials as well as hazards. The government, in consultation not just with architects and engineers but also professionals from geography, urban planning and the environmental sciences, need to determine what “environmental impact” means, in relation to a proposed condominium site.

A few lonely voices, like those of architect Ana Maria Gonzales, reminded us in the aftermath of “Ondoy” that too many concrete structures, without enough green spaces around, mean that rain waters cannot seep down into the soil, and therefore increase the chances of quick floods.

The environmental stress posed by a middle-class condo is multiplied many times over in a high-end project. I can empathize with the Loyola residents about 20 additional floors in SM Blue. On the street where my parents live, there’s a five-story condo unit with about 20 families, built more than a decade ago. At first glance, it’s a dream place—“low-rise” and “low-density.”  The problem is that it was built close to the entrance of the one street that constitutes this tiny subdivision, where another 20 or so families live. The condo unit did not build enough parking spaces so the cars (each family has more than one vehicle) spill out into the street and block the flow of traffic. Emotions run high as non-condominium homeowners feel a violation of their spaces.

Empowered

That one street is now organized into  a homeowners’ association (minus the condominium residents),  vigilant about anyone who wants to put up new structures. People planning to build or renovate must present architectural plans to the homeowners, who scrutinize everything from the height to the distance between houses. And the homeowners are confident they have enough clout with city hall to block any new construction that might disrupt their ecology, and sanity.

But that’s just one street. San Juan is now a prime target for condo developers and residents are not always organized or empowered. Which is why people are watching the SM Blue case, where we see a powerful megacorporation pitted now against Ateneo and the Loyola community, who are themselves quite empowered.

Meanwhile, as I drive through Katipunan each day on my way to UP and look at the changing skyline, I think of how the traffic has worsened each year, and long before the proliferation of condos. There are just too many cars, many SUVs, bringing in one or two students to school. There have been plans to decongest, from using car pools to putting up “terminals” where students can be brought in by their private cars and then bussed to the universities. But the plans never materialized as families protested, citing security concerns and the right to use one’s own vehicle.

Our fears of condos and pandemonium should challenge us to think harder not just about the “sins” of others, but also our own deficiencies in the collective responsibilities for the common good.