The coming squeeze: a Manila warning we should not ignore

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

A discussion paper released in December 2025 by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies should be required reading for every city planner, councilor, and developer in Western Visayas. Titled “Urban Revitalization and Shelter Inadequacy: A Geospatial Analysis,” the study by Jenica A. Ancheta, Marife M. Ballesteros, and Tatum P. Ramos walks through three decades of township-driven urban renewal in Metro Manila and arrives at a sobering conclusion: large mixed-use developments have indeed transformed the capital, but the gains are spatially uneven, and the housing crisis has deepened rather than eased.

The PIDS study used geospatial analysis — satellite imagery, land value mapping, housing census data — to trace what happens to a city when township developments take root. Metro Manila, home to 13.5 million people packed at over 43,000 persons per square kilometer, has been the laboratory.

The findings are instructive and, frankly, alarming.

Between 2006 and 2021, the construction of residential housing in Metro Manila rose 13-fold in unit count and floor area, according to the authors’ processing of data from the Philippine Statistics Authority and Local Building Officials. Within a one-kilometer radius of Bonifacio Global City, zonal land values jumped by as much as 3,008 percent over roughly two decades, based on Bureau of Internal Revenue data. Within a three-kilometer buffer, average increases ran between 500 percent and 600 percent. From 2016 to 2024, the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development issued 552 licenses to sell for residential-commercial condominiums and 356 for residential condominiums in Metro Manila — and only eight socialized housing and 14 economic housing licenses for the entire region over those nine years.

Read that again: in a metropolis of 13.5 million people, the country’s housing regulator approved a grand total of 22 affordable-tier projects in nearly a decade. Economic and socialized housing did not vanish; it migrated. Of the 1,241 economic-housing projects licensed in NCR, Region III, and Region IV-A combined during the same period, 752 were built in CALABARZON and 347 in Central Luzon — pushed to Cavite, Batangas, Laguna, Bulacan, and Pampanga. The PIDS authors call this what it is: urban sprawl dressed up as choice, with low-income families absorbing the commuting cost of a market that no longer makes room for them at the center.

Iloilo is not Metro Manila. We have time. The question is whether we will use it.

The Mandurriao mirror

Stand on Megaworld Boulevard at dusk and the resemblance is hard to miss. The 72-hectare Iloilo Business Park, carved out of the old Mandurriao airport, now hosts The Palladium, Saint Honore and Saint Dominique, One Madison Place, La Fayette Park Square, and the preselling Firenze Residences and The Pinnacle, with Belmont Hotel Iloilo and the International Corporate Plaza filling out the commercial spine. Megaworld has publicly committed roughly PHP 35 billion to the township, its single largest investment outside Luzon. A short tricycle ride away, Ayala Land’s Atria complex along Donato Pison Avenue is doing its own version of the same playbook on a 5.5-hectare parcel — residential towers, a mall, and office space, all marketed as a self-contained “live-work-play” district.

Just across the fence is SM City’s own sprawling developments of its mall, condominiums, and even a school.

These are, by any measure, impressive projects. They have given the city a convention center, an IT-BPO cyberpark, and a tax base that helps explain why Iloilo City was recently profiled as the richest local government unit outside Metro Manila. Property listings in early 2026 quote three-bedroom units in Mandurriao at PHP 10,500,000 and Palladium two-bedroom flats at PHP 19,500,000 all-in. By 2027, when Firenze and The Pinnacle turn over, the Mandurriao skyline will be unrecognizable from the one most Ilonggos grew up with.

The PIDS study tells us, in advance, what comes next if nothing else changes.

The four warnings Iloilo should heed

First, proximity does not guarantee inclusion. The PIDS authors found that even barangays directly adjacent to BGC, such as Pembo in Makati and several flood-prone communities along the Pasig and Marikina rivers, remained pockets of low zonal value and high uninhabitability while the township itself appreciated wildly. The same logic applies to Mandurriao. The barangays around Iloilo Business Park — San Rafael, Tabucan, Hibao-an, parts of Calahunan — sit on the edge of one of the country’s fastest-rising land markets, but the families living in older neighborhoods or along the Iloilo and Batiano rivers will not automatically benefit from that rise. Without inclusionary policy, they will be priced out of the very wards they have lived in for generations.

Second, the housing supply that gets built is the housing supply the market wants to build. PIDS documents how Metro Manila’s developers concentrated on residential and residential-commercial condominiums — units priced for upper-middle and high-income buyers, retirees, BPO professionals, and OFWs investing from abroad. Socialized and economic housing was simply not profitable enough at NCR land prices, so it relocated to the next region. Iloilo’s preselling market is already drifting in this direction. The condominium pipeline is dense; the affordable-housing pipeline is thin. The Iloilo City Local Housing Office reported in September 2025 that the number of informal settler families had swelled to 22,038 in the first quarter of 2025, far above the 15,000 projected in the city’s 2016-2025 Local Shelter Plan. The mismatch is no longer theoretical.

Third, sprawl is the default when the center prices people out. When Manila’s housing center of gravity shifted to Cavite and Bulacan, it did not solve the affordability problem; it converted it into a transport problem, a flooding problem, and a public-services problem. Iloilo’s analog is already visible in the rapid subdivision activity in Pavia, Sta. Barbara, Oton, and Leganes — bedroom communities for workers who cannot afford Mandurriao or City Proper rents. The Iloilo-Capiz expressway and the planned panhandle road network will accelerate this. Without coordinated land-use planning between the city and the surrounding municipalities, the province risks reproducing CALABARZON’s worst feature: long, expensive commutes that hollow out family time and trap low-income workers in fuel poverty.

Fourth, environmental risk and exclusion compound each other. PIDS shows that Navotas and Malabon, despite being in Metro Manila proper, attracted almost no licensed developments between 2016 and 2024 — three projects in Malabon, none in Navotas — because they are flood-prone, low-lying, and exposed to land subsidence. Investors and government followed each other’s caution, and the result was decades of stalled development for the residents who actually live there. Iloilo’s coastal barangays in Lapuz, Molo, Arevalo, and the Iloilo North Bank Road’s Sunset Boulevard area face a similar bind. The city’s PASILONG program, launched in October 2025 by Mayor Raisa Treñas to relocate informal settlers from danger zones, is a serious policy response. But it cannot, by itself, change the calculation that makes private capital avoid the same neighborhoods it leaves behind.

What Iloilo can do that Manila did not

The PIDS authors close their paper with a set of policy implications that translate cleanly into Iloilo’s context. Three deserve particular attention here.

Mandate mixed-income planning inside township developments. Republic Act 7279, the Urban Development and Housing Act, and Republic Act 10884 already require subdivision and condominium developers to allocate 15 percent of project cost to socialized housing for subdivisions, and 5 percent for condominiums. The PIDS authors note this provision exists in law but is rarely linked to the actual location of the township project — developers can satisfy the requirement by building far away. Iloilo can go further by ordinance: require that a meaningful share of every large mixed-use development inside the city deliver affordable units on-site or in adjacent barangays, not in a relocation site 15 kilometers away. The city has the zoning authority to do this. The political question is whether it will.

Use escrow funds and value capture aggressively. Land values in Iloilo Business Park and Atria have risen because of public goods — roads, drainage, the convention center, the riverside esplanade, MORE Power’s grid upgrades. The state created much of that uplift; it is reasonable for the state to recover a share of it. Balanced-housing escrow funds, idle-land taxes, and special assessment levies on benefited properties are tools the Local Government Code already provides. None require new national legislation. All require municipal political will.

Plan for the metropolitan footprint, not just the city. Iloilo’s coming urban region is a continuous belt that runs from Pavia and Sta. Barbara in the north to Oton and Tigbauan in the south, with Guimaras across the strait. The PIDS study’s most uncomfortable finding is that Manila’s neighbors absorbed the displaced housing demand without ever being consulted. The Metro Iloilo-Guimaras Development Council, and the Regional Development Council have a narrow window to write a regional land-use plan that allocates affordable housing, transport corridors, and flood infrastructure across LGU boundaries before the market does it for them — badly.

The honest reckoning

There is a temptation, when a city is finally getting its long-deferred share of investment, to treat any concern about equity as ingratitude. That temptation should be resisted. The PIDS paper is not an argument against township development; it is an argument that township development without inclusionary planning produces wealth and exclusion in roughly equal measure. Metro Manila is the proof of concept. Its skyline is dazzling. Its housing crisis is generational.

Iloilo still has the rare luxury of looking at someone else’s mistakes before making its own. The Mandurriao towers are not the problem. The 22,000 informal settler families living in their shadow, on riverbanks and railings and reclaimed coastlines, are the question those towers will eventually have to answer. The sooner the city, the province, and the developers themselves engage that question seriously — through zoning, through escrow discipline, through honest regional planning, through a refusal to outsource our affordability problem to Pavia and Oton — the smaller the bill will be when it comes due.

Manila is showing us what happens when the bill is allowed to compound. We have read the warning. The only thing left is to act on it.

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The celebration has ebbed, but Daily Guardian’s journey to the next 25 years (and beyond) in local journalism continues.

But before anything else, we would like to thank several friends and visitors who graced our anniversary gala last April 29 at the Iloilo Convention Center.

Special thanks to Iloilo City Mayor Raisa Treñas for honoring us with her presence. Not a few folks would place DG and Mayor Raisa at odds over key issues, but her attendance shows class act from a young leader. Good luck and all the best, Mayora Raisa.

I also got to hobnob with the young and feisty Councilor Rex Marcus Sarabia. I intimated to him how he reminded me of his late mom, former councilor and Judge Rita Bascos-Sarabia. Rest assured Councilor Rex that DG will defend your right to speak your mind on key issues.

Also, Vice Mayor Love Baronda was also there, though we missed her sister, Rep. Jam Baronda.

Other city leaders who were present were Councilors Sedfrey Cabaluna, Rommel Duron, Nene dela Llana, and former councilor Ely Estante. Dispensa kon may nalimtan ako.

More on DG’s anniversary gala in the next issue.