Busy, old Guadalupe Bridge up for retrofitting in 2019

Hustling Guadalupe Bridge in Makati City will finally get the needed repair early in 2019, more that six years after Japan experts recommended a fix due to cracks in its columns and foundations.

A report on "Unang Balita" said that the bridge, forming part of EDSA, is scheduled for partial retrofitting in March or April 2019.

In 2012, experts at the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) recommended the bridge for the retrofitting, after seeing cracks in its columns, the report said.

During an ocular survey on the bridge last Wednesday, GMA News, together with JICA and Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) officials, saw the bridge's rusty steel trusses, and cracks and wholes in its foundations.

DPWH officials were quoted in the report as saying that the bridge's seismic capacity has diminished and may not be able to withstand a strong quake.

Some 200,000 vehicles (all types) pass through Guadalupe Bridge everyday and it has deteriorated overtime due to continuous use, experts said.

Meanwhile, the DPWH on Wednesday said that it is closely monitoring a dozen more bridges in Metro Manila because of their "poor condition."

Aside from the Otis Bridge in Manila, which is now under repair, 12 other bridges, including the Guadalupe Bridge have been recommended for repairs.

Among the 12 is the historic Old Santa Mesa Bridge or San Juan del Monte Bridge connecting the city of San Juan and Santa Mesa in Manila, which was marked by the DPWH with an overall condition of "poor" in November 2017, according to a report by Bam Alegre on "News To Go" last Wednesday. —LBG, GMA News

Election promise of in-city relocation hangs

CONDEMNED Authorities have declared Fort Bonifacio Tenement at Barangay Western Bicutan in Taguig City structurally unsafe and told the residents to leave.—LYN RILLON

(Last of two parts)

In 2010, her campaign for Taguig’s mayoralty took candidate Lani Cayetano to Fort Bonifacio (FB) Tenement, a low-cost housing site on the city’s western fringe that was bracing for disaster.

Residents of FB Tenement, a pillar of the late President Diosdado Macapagal’s program to expand housing options to the slums, had been ordered to leave the 1960s structure, which had been condemned.

“You will not be leaving,” Cayetano told the anxious residents. “You can now sleep in peace.”

The residents of the tenement voted for Cayetano, who went on to win the mayoral race. She cruised to reelection in 2013, and again three years later.

But in the eight years that followed Cayetano’s first visit — which was one of only two visits — to FB Tenement at Barangay Western Bicutan, the residents have not had much peaceful sleep.

After she won her first term, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) wrote to then Vice President Jejomar Binay, saying FB Tenement and two other housing sites in Manila were “unsafe and should be immediately vacated.”

Eviction notices

Since then, at least 19 eviction notices have been issued to the residents of FB Tenement.

They, in turn, have delivered 36 letters to the local government of Taguig, hoping to make their case for temporary, in-city relocation while waiting for a new tenement to be built.

Their pleas have gone unanswered. The National Housing Authority (NHA) has again warned the residents of forced eviction if they refuse to leave voluntarily.

“We wanted to give a chance to those who were hoping for in-city relocation. We wanted the local government to be part of the solution, but nothing materialized,” said NHA spokesperson Elsie Trinidad.

Trinidad defended the NHA decision to bring up the possibility of evictions after two years of relative silence on the matter.

While the controversy is often portrayed as a deadlock between the residents and the NHA, it appears that both parties are also eager to point to the local government as responsible for the situation.

“All I know is the NHA [officials] are willing to solve the problem,” said Lito Sarcilla, president of FB Tenement Homeowners’ Association. “The problem here is the local government. They are not willing.”

Where’s the mayor?

“Ever since our problem began, Mayor Cayetano has not faced us,” echoed Reynaldo Ramos, a member of the association’s board.

Only Cayetano’s underlings at the local housing office have been dealing with the residents, Ramos said.

President Duterte himself wrote to Cayetano on behalf of the residents but she did not respond, according to Lorenzo Calaminos, spokesperson for the Concerned Residents of FB Tenement Alliance.

There was no immediate comment from the Taguig City local government.

“We’ve been asking them to give us in-city relocation, but they have not acted at all,” Ramos said.

Instead, the residents have been offered a relocation site at Barangay Aguado in Trece Martires City, Cavite province.

According to the residents, the Trece Martires site has no livelihood and schooling options, a far cry from FB Tenement, where hospitals, schools, and even the barangay hall are just a stone’s throw away.

“To move to [Trece Martires] would be like committing suicide,” said Eddie Barbuena, another member of the homeowners’ association’s board.

Toxic relocation area

Barbuena’s remark may not be hyperbole. According to Calaminos, the air, soil and water in the Trece Martires site are  contaminated by a nearby toxic waste facility.

Records from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources show that a treatment, storage and disposal facility for hazardous waste registered to Integrated Waste Management Inc. (IWMI) was  located at Barangay Aguado in 2014.

“It’s not a relocation site, it’s a cemetery,” Calaminos said. “They say FB Tenement is a danger zone, but now they’ll bring us to a death zone.”

Documents obtained by the Inquirer show that the IWMI facility treated waste such as pesticide, confiscated dangerous drugs and expired pharmaceutical products, among other hazardous trash.

Calaminos said that in 2005, international study groups on pollution issues released a report stating that the eggs of chickens grown near the facility contained “alarming levels of dioxin,” one of the most toxic chemicals known to science.

According to NHA field officer Sonia Mabeza, the agency had not heard of toxic waste in the area.

“These kinds of housing projects in the area would not have been put up if there was an issue like that. It’s moot and academic,” she said.

Mabeza said the NHA was no longer offering the Trece Martires relocation site to FB Tenement residents because there were no more vacant lots in the area.

The lack of a viable option for relocation — temporary or permanent — does not fully explain, however, why 1,000 families remain in the “condemned” compound.

Vibrancy, not decay

On paper, the DPWH has called FB Tenement “ruinous,” yet its most striking feature is not a sense of decay or dilapidation, but an unmistakable vibrancy.

When members of the community speak about the tenement — which has blossomed throughout the decades into a world unto itself, replete with its own salon, meat shops and church — it is with a keen sense of pride and touch of protectiveness, like a parent.

“As a resident, you would know how strong this building is,” Barbuena said. “This is where I was born. This is where I will die.”

Graffiti in eye-popping colors and bold designs adorn the ground and walls of the well-loved basketball courts, which have been a stomping ground for no less than NBA stars LeBron James, Jordan Clarkson and Paul George.

International rapper Mike Swift, who was raised in New York City, said he fell in love with the tenement when a resident introduced him to the place because it reminded him of life in the Big Apple.

“When we moved here [in 1967], our lives changed. I was finally able to study,” said Sarcilla, who added that FB Tenement had been a lifeline out of poverty — a buoy that enabled poor families to make a living without worrying about astronomical rent.

“We came from mud, and now the government is not only returning us to mud, but drowning us in it,” he said.

Strong community ties

Eighty-two-year-old Severino Ramos Jr., who moved into FB Tenement in 1976, is the oldest original resident of the building.

His apartment, though small, is decked with things amassed by multiple generations that have occupied it — a Bible and magnifying glass set on a wooden stand, books on a shelf with such titles as “How to Have an Obedient Dog” and “Medical Cures and Treatments,” keepsakes, including magnets, from travels.

“Even if you start out poor here, you can send your kids to school,” Ramos said. “And when they’re done, you leave the tenement so someone else can benefit.”

But the strong community ties kept him from leaving even after he, as a furniture maker, had put all five of his children through college.

The residents are quick to remind the local government that they are not informal settlers, but housing awardees who have been working and paying taxes in Taguig for generations.

“I am all for the progress of Taguig,” Sarcilla said. “But the problem is, are we part of the progress? Or do they see us as an obstacle, a disturbance to progress?



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Scavengers living in condemned tenements face eviction

(First of two parts)

Tessie Rada, a 63-year-old grandmother, has learned to navigate through labyrinthine Aroma Compound, a temporary housing project at Vitas, in Manila’s Tondo district, with near-gymnastic skill.

To get from the welcome arch on R-10 Road to her apartment in Building 2, she sidesteps heaps of garbage and puddles of mud, and squeezes into narrow alleys between decaying buildings and heaving flesh.

The air is thick with the stench of rotting food and sweat, but she’s not winded at all.

“You get used to it,” she said. “It’s not that we don’t aspire for better conditions. We just live with what we have.”

Rada and her family of five are among the 5,000 residents of Aroma Compound, which was built for the scavengers of Smokey Mountain.

They have been waiting to be moved to permanent shelters since 1995, when the government ordered the dump shuttered due to environmental pollution and risk to public health.

But 23 years later, the National Housing Authority (NHA) has condemned the site as unsafe, along with Punta Santa Ana Tenements, also in Manila, and Fort Bonifacio Tenement in Taguig City. All 7,000 occupants of the three tenements have been ordered to leave.

“They say they wish to relocate us to a site where it’s safer,” Rada said, gesturing toward the collapsed concrete wall of her apartment building, which overlooks a mountain of trash.

“Yes, we would be physically safe. But the options are far from our livelihoods, far from [the children’s] schools. They might as well have sentenced us to death,” she said.

Worst lot

Like most of the residents, Rada and her husband worked as scavengers to raise their three grandchildren, all in elementary school.

Except for Aroma—or Vitas, which was erected two decades later—the tenements were built in the 1960s as part of the NHA mandate to provide affordable housing for low-income families.

Vitas has 34 two-story buildings that were originally designed to accommodate 2,500 families.

The families were supposed to be transferred to permanent houses at Paradise Heights, an in-city relocation site in Tondo, Manila.

But when the NHA finally finished building the houses in 2004, not everyone was accommodated, said Elsie Trinidad, a spokesperson for the housing agency.

Evangeline Rontos, who was in her teens when her parents left her to move to Paradise Heights, sold her apartment there and settled in Caloocan City.

“It was beautiful then, clean and organized,” Rontos, 39, said of the Vitas of her youth.

With a husband who works as trash hauler and four children, she said the neighborhood was now foul and filthy. “We’re watching it crumble,” she said.

Maxed out

Some of those still staying in Vitas are original awardees with extended families. Others have moved out but are renting their apartments to outsiders.

The buildings swiftly decayed as the population doubled, and from years of overuse, Trinidad said.

In 2010, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) declared the buildings “structurally unsound, dangerous and high-risk.”

The walls and roofs have either collapsed or cracked, plastered over by the residents with whatever they could find—plywood, wire mesh, tarpaulin—to keep what remains of the structures from falling apart.

Midway to the housing project’s period of viability and liveability, usually around 50 years, it has maxed out what Trinidad called its “full economic life.”

The Office of the Building Official in Manila ordered the buildings’ demolition on Nov. 20, 2017, citing three findings from an inspection two years earlier.

Vitas did not have substantial drainage systems and sanitary facilities.

The common comfort rooms in each structure were clogged and could not accommodate the simultaneous needs of occupants.

Obnoxious odor prevailed and posed health hazards.

Citing these flaws, alongside the government’s campaign to prepare the city for a possible “Big One” earthquake, the NHA has renewed its appeals to occupants to vacate the buildings for their own safety.

“These housing sites are disasters waiting to happen,” Trinidad said. “The only option is preemptive evacuation before anything [bad] happens.”

Too late?

As early as 2012, the NHA had been offering the residents alternative government housing sites in Naic, Cavite province, Baras in Rizal province and Camarin in Caloocan. In March, the agency pressed its order to the residents to leave voluntarily or face eviction, taking the residents by surprise.

“They let the problem sit for years, and then suddenly they call for preemptive evacuation. [What] is really their interest here? They have no concrete plans for us,” said Fe Hullipaz, president of the Vitas residents’ group, Samahan ng mga Maralita sa Tenement Housing.

Trinidad said the NHA had seen through the residents’ calls for in-city relocation.

“We had to listen to them. [We] have given them since 2012, but the preferences of the people, they did not materialize,” she said.

The residents have found allies in several militant party-list lawmakers, particularly Gabriela Rep. Emmi de Jesus, who volunteered to help negotiate with local governments for in-city relocation.

But there was hardly available land and most local governments approached by De Jesus did not want to shoulder the burden of more informal settlers.

In the end, the original alternative sites on the outskirts of Metro Manila have remained the only viable option.

Retrofit, not demolish

The same concerns were shared by residents of Punta Santa Ana Tenements in Manila. The project’s towering, uniform structures belie the buildings’ deterioration.

Built along the Pasig River in 1963 under then President Diosdado Macapagal for informal settlers transferred from danger zones, the tenements were home to at least 1,000 people.

The two multistory buildings weren’t just structures but represented Barangays 901 and 902 of Manila.

Their fate was political capital for candidates during elections, though no official has really made overtures to the NHA, Trinidad said.

“In any case, the barangays exist only because of the tenements. The officials, the voters are also the residents. When it’s demolished, so too are the barangays,” she said.

“It’s really the homeowners who resist the order and negotiate with the NHA,” she added.

Eduardo Igoy, the president of the homeowners’ association, insisted the buildings were fine, arguing that the DPWH and the NHA did not even conduct a “scientific test” to determine its structural soundness before it released its 2010 order to vacate.

But Gracia Malimban, NHA field officer for Punta Santa Ana, said that Igoy was merely referring to a hammer test, which required the residents to vacate and the apartments padlocked before the test could be carried out.

“No one wanted to do that, of course,” Malimban said.

The DPWH still tested eight cores of the two buildings and discovered that the concrete within had been pulverized.

Rehabilitation

Still, residents for both Vitas and Punta Santa Ana remain hopeful that the NHA will retrofit, not demolish, the buildings.

Ricardo Cajigas, Manila city engineer, told the Inquirer that the housing projects, especially Vitas, were well past the point of rehabilitation.

“It would cost more to save the structures than to build new ones. Rehabilitating the structures would essentially be rebuilding the whole thing anyway,” Cajigas said.

The NHA has yet to determine what it plans to do with the properties after the buildings are demolished.

Trinidad said the agency was considering reclassifying the land for mix-use purposes and develop the sites through public-private partnerships, which would surely make any housing project in the area expensive.

“If we do build another housing site there, of course its former residents would be the priority,” said NHA’s Trinidad.

“But it’s going to be under a set of new terms and conditions. If before they paid P7 for rent way back in 1965, it’s going to be different now. After all, the thrust of the government is affordable, not free, housing,” she added.

For the people soon to be uprooted from their homes, they cannot even see the future for which they are being given priority. They view the proposal as just another one of the risks they have to choose from.

“We’ll continue in our fight for our right to live here,” Hullipaz said. “At least until we are given better options.”