‘Iloilo City for Everyone’ faces test at the market

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Go to the La Paz market early, before the heat. The floor is still wet from the hosing and the batchoy stalls are just getting their cauldrons going. I have spent a lot of mornings there over the years, and that is where you actually learn what Iloilo is – in the aisle where a tindera and her suki argue over aloy or tamodyos like the price is personal, because to them it is.

Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu came home from Singapore with a good line. At the 10th World Cities Summit – theme “Liveable and Sustainable Cities: ACT Now!” – she told Channel NewsAsia that Iloilo does not dream of being a mega city, only “a better city that is people-centered and a city for everyone.” It is the kind of sentence that travels well on a global stage. I have helped enough friends polish enough sentences like it to know how they are made, and how easily they are made. The harder question, the one that does not fit on a conference slide, is whether the line survives the trip home to the wet market.

Give her the wins first, because they are real, and because we have seen them before. The redeveloped Central and Terminal markets reopened in late 2025, built with SM Prime at no direct cost to the city. Three district markets – Arevalo, Jaro, La Paz – followed, this time on the public purse. I remember the old Terminal Market: the standing water, the tangle of wires overhead, the particular smell of a building that has flooded one time too many. Vendors who are not easy to please – and Ilonggo vendors are not easy to please – have told me their sales went up. That is not nothing. And disaster preparedness, drilled into this city after the floods and quakes of the early 2000s, is genuine local competence, not just for show. I covered the aftermath of Typhoon Frank in 2008. I know what unpreparedness looked like in this city, and I have watched it learn. That learning is real, and it should be said plainly before anything else.

But “for everyone” is a promise with a bill attached, and the bill shows up in the 2026 budget. The city proposes PHP 4.5 billion for the year. Tucked inside is PHP 145.79 million in debt service – including PHP 81 million in interest alone, covering the market rehabilitation, the new city hospital, and a parking building. Modernization was not free. It was financed. That is a defensible choice; cities borrow against the future all the time, and a market built to last forty years is a reasonable thing to borrow for. But it also means the markets have to keep performing for years, through administrations that may not share this one’s priorities, or the arithmetic stops working. Debt does not read press releases. It only compounds.

I do not begrudge a mayor a plane ticket, either. The World Cities Summit is a serious gathering – Prime Minister Lawrence Wong opened it, and the hall was full of people who run cities far larger and stranger than ours. There is real value in being in that room, in carrying the name “Iloilo” into a conversation that usually skips straight over mid-sized Southeast Asian cities. The trouble is that value-in-a-room is the easiest kind of value to claim and the hardest to audit. The honest question is not whether the trip looked good in the photographs. It is whether anything from it lands here, in a form a fishmonger would recognize as her life getting easier. I have sat through enough events billed as “knowledge-sharing” to know that a fair number of them share no knowledge at all.

The market program was conceived under Jerry Treñas, the current mayor’s father, who pushed it through stiff opposition before retiring in 2025. The lady mayor says so herself: “My father began these projects.” Iloilo’s proudest reform is, in plain terms, an inheritance handed from father to daughter inside the same office. I do not raise this to be unkind. Good ideas do not turn bad because of who signs them, and the elder Treñas was, whatever else one thinks of him, a builder willing to be disliked for a year to be thanked in five. But succession is not the same thing as a mandate freely contested. The longer the road to the city’s highest office runs through one household, the thinner “a city for everyone” sounds – because a city that is genuinely for everyone should, in time, be governable by anyone. We have a word for the alternative in this country, and a bill against it that keeps dying quietly in Congress.

Then there is the gastronomy card. The UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy designation, earned in October 2023, is now folded neatly into the pitch – markets as tourism, heritage as strategy. I am all for it. Few things make me prouder than seeing batchoy, pancit molo, and KBL or kadyos-baboy-langka treated as the civic treasures they are. But I have watched what “heritage-led development” does in other places. Cleaner, brighter, mall-adjacent markets raise rents. They reward the vendor who can afford signage and a chest freezer, and they quietly squeeze the manang selling three kinds of bagoong from one corner table – the very people whose unglamorous, generational cooking earned Iloilo that label in the first place. Inclusion is not automatic. It does not arrive because we wished for it on a stage in Singapore. It has to be written into the lease, in plain Hiligaynon, at a stall rate a small seller can actually pay.

I think of a manang vendor – there is one in every market in this city – who has sold the same fermented goodness from the same spot for thirty years, whose customers are now the grown children of her first customers. Modernization, done carelessly, has no place for her. It has a place for a franchise. And so the truest test of “a city for everyone” is not the architect’s render or the ribbon or the CNA segment. It is whether that manang is still at her corner in 2030, or whether the corner has become a milk tea kiosk with better lighting and a worse soul.

On housing, the mayor speaks of socialized and rental programs, and I want to believe the figures are good. But I have been in this trade long enough to flinch at the word “ongoing.” Ongoing is where accountability goes to lie down and rest. How many units, finished, occupied, and by whom? A family moved out of a danger zone and into a home it can keep is a measurable thing. A “program” is not.

So what should an Ilonggo reader actually want from all of this – the summits, the citations, the ribbon-cuttings? Not less ambition, and not fewer trips abroad; a mayor who learns is better than one who does not. What we should want is receipts. Specific ones. Publish vendor-retention and stall-occupancy rates for every redeveloped market – old tenants beside new ones, updated each year. Put the socialized housing numbers online the way the budget itself is published: units built, families moved in, relocation sites named. Point to one concrete idea brought home from Singapore that reaches an actual barangay within the year, not as a handout but as a thing a resident can touch. And tie the gastronomy branding to a vendor-protection clause, so that heritage becomes something the manangs are paid to keep, rather than priced out of.

None of these are radical asks. They are the ordinary homework of a government that means what it says, and they would cost the mayor nothing except the small discomfort of being measured.

I keep returning to that hour at the market — the wet floor, the cauldrons, the suki who has fed my family for years and who has never once been to a summit. She is the “everyone” in “a city for everyone.” She does not need to be told the city loves her. She needs the rent to stay payable, the new roof to keep its promise, and a government willing to show its work. Iloilo does not have to become a mega city. On that, the mayor and I agree completely. But a better city — a real one, people-centered and not merely described that way — is a measurable thing. So let us measure it. Namit ang dungog (the honor is sweet), but pride has never once fed a tindera. Receipts do.