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Urban development rules and practices an increasingly potent political issue
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Urban woes not easily ignored
by Eric Jackson

For years it has been possible to fill a room with a few dozen to a few hundred urban policy wonks to talk about urban concerns like transportation, parks, pollution or public infrastructures. It has also been easy for politicians to take money from those with a pecuniary interest in ignoring such concerns, and in last year's canal referendum and with the ongoing construction and real estate speculation boom a sector of developers has more or less come to dominate the government. They're promising jobs and prosperity, delivering little bits of those things and creating expectations of more.

However, everything hasn't gone smoothly according to plan and yesteryear's environmentalist and urban planning intellectuals have been surprised by reinforcements. Now as then, the heart of the movement is middle class --- people who aren't desperate for a job but are increasingly annoyed that when they drive they keep running into near gridlock traffic jams and if they walk they have to step through raw sewage running in the street.

The biggest changes, it seems, are the loss of a sense of inevitability that the most ambitious and rapacious developers will succeed, and a public jaded by repeated demonstrations of political failure in the face of collapsing urban systems.

Panama City has seen three different "tallest building in Latin America" project floated and burst. The Generali Tower project on Calle 50 got as far as a big hole on Calle 50 that bred nearly as many litigants as it did mosquitoes. The Palacio de Bahia project on Avenida Balboa broke ground, but rather early in the game someone figured out that the plan called for seven stories of underground parking on a site that's landfill. That business catastrophe was quickly followed by the Ice Tower's meltdown, the cancellation of Park 32 in Costa del Este, Btesh & Virzi's greedy little cancellation of purchase contracts in order to resell units they'd already pre-sold to other buyers at higher prices, the realization that the US housing market is soft and the announcement that the Trump complex didn't have either all their financing arranged or all their units pre-sold as previously claimed. For people who believe in that sort of thing, International Living demoted Panama as a retirement paradise. In Spain a consumer group started publishing things about misrepresentations in Panama City real estate sales pitches.

There's still a lot of construction going on, but the notion that a condo in Panama City is worth more than a similar one in Miami is now deflated. The people who think of Panama as a place to get rich flipping real estate are mostly gone now, and the ones who still believe that are prime candidates for Thanksgiving dinner. Only Venezuelan exiles, Colombian drug money and a few Europeans who think that given the dollar's weakness against the euro Panama's still a bargain are keeping the upper end Panama City real estate market from total collapse.

Meanwhile, there are all those people who, when the Generali Tower and later the Palacio de Bahia and Ice Tower were touted, wondered aloud where all those cars would be parked and how they'd get in and out, and where the sewage would be dumped and whether there was any chance of water pressure on the upper floors.

Silly pessimistic perpetual nay-sayers, the short-sighted developers and the politicians they have bought may still sneer, but even the blind know by their own senses that the capital's sewage system has collapsed --- you don't have to see it to smell it.

And urban mass transit? Torrijos sent in Noriega's adjutant, Major Mejías, to stare down the bus syndicates, but then it turned out that the president hadn't done any of his homework and all there was to his threat and promise of a "Transmilenio" system was a slogan and the dissipated mirage that for a time had some well connected corporate types salivating about a monopoly. Left with no card to play, the PRD pretty much caved to the bus syndicates and pointed the finger elsewhere to assess blame.

It's pretty clear that the people who have been in charge in both the public and private sectors have no realistic plans in the face of growing chaos.

So now, middle class people who never participated in a demonstration before are marching in the streets in protests against developers led by architects. Now people in neighborhoods all over the city are banding together suing MIVI and various developers. Now nervous politicians who played along with the game are beginning to hedge their bets.

One sign of the ferment took place at the Alliance Francaise on October 25, when architect Laura Candanedo addressed an overflow crowd of middle aged homeowners and university students, women dressed for business success and men in raggedy jeans and chancletas, a collection of hues a bit browner and more varied than one saw at an urban policy forum a few years ago.

"They talk about progress, they talk about development. They use it as an excuse," Candanedo charged. "We need to talk about quality of life."

A proper urban development policy, she argued, begins with an inventory. "What do we have, and in what condition do we have it?"

Ever less, it appears. She demonstrated a facet of the problem with a series of slides about what's happening to sidewalks. Homeowners, businesses, electric utilities and individual drivers are increasingly grabbing these public spaces, forcing pedestrians to walk in the streets.

Then, she pointed out, there are the upscale developers grabbing public parks, deteriorating conditions in our public markets, greedy bits of lunacy like the idea that taking over the Avenida Central pedestrian mall for business parking will revive the area's retail heyday of decades ago and everything around us broken and getting worse.

She noted that what's today's Cinta Costera project is derived from a 1999 plan by a US company --- but that project was to create green spaces for a park-deficient city, while the Torrijos administration has turned it into a road project supported by such a deficient environmental impact statement that it doesn't even address the source of the fill material.

Candanedo called the building boom at Punta Pacifica "a tumor" that's "creating this landfill and building for high density without adequate ingress or egress."

She reviewed a number of the neighborhood fights against various developments, like the Balboa gas station that was being built without any sort of plan and in violation of laws prohibiting such things in proximity to residences and schools; like an Ancon building owner who illegally closed a public street with a chain and then prevailed on police to go after the neighbor who cut it with a pair of bolt cutters; like the struggle against turning the top of Ancon Hill, a national park, into a private cable car and tourist center development alleged by its promoters to be like Disney World; like the Housing Ministry's systematic flouting of zoning laws to favor politically connected developers.

(She didn't know it at the time, but as Candanedo spoke the Supreme Court was drafting an order to suspend a slew of Housing Ministry rezoning resolutions pending further litigation and Housing Minister Balbina Herrera was making herself unavailable for comment, first by a trip abroad and then by taking a couple of months of sick leave.)

It's not just Panama City, Candanedo pointed out, citing attempts to privatize access to the public beach in Santa Clara, residential developments on hillsides in the Interior that have peoples' new houses sliding away, developers showing admirable plans to get the needed permits and then eliminating public spaces and vital infrastructures from what's actually built, and other abuses all across the country.

All of these cases, Candanedo, argued, have one thing in common: "When we are fighting, one for the beach, one for the hills, one for something else, we are reacting but we all have the same problem --- there are rules but they aren't being applied."

Did the people in the crowd agree on what to do?

Not particularly. The widespread sense that our capital city is badly broken and that people with narrow special interests are getting around the law to make it worse is out there as a political issue. However, it remains to be seen which politicians might be able to take what sorts of advantage of it, and beyond that there's the bottom line issue of what can be done in the sense of actually solving the physical problems.

Also in this section:
Urban development rules and practices an increasingly potent political issue
Doctors talking strike action
He always wanted a bank of his own

Is Amway the Panamanian way?
The Panama News readership up
Business & Economy Briefs