business & economy

Leaflet promoting an Atlantic side residents' protest

Urban crisis becomes the subject of middle class anger
by Eric Jackson

For several years a number of related urban development issues have been simmering in middle class neighborhoods.

Twice a day traffic jams in Paitilla and El Cangrejo, with high rise residential towers popping up around a single dead-end street in Punta Pacifica symbolizing the government's intention to allow more of the same, are aggravating public anger about plans for more and taller condo developments in El Cangrejo and Paitilla.

All over the capital, in both rich and poor neighborhoods, it's not unusual to see little geysers of raw sewage spurting up from the street. The promise that there will be a new sewer and sewage treatment system some years in the future isn't all that reassuring, especially when that raw sewage flow that took months for IDAAN to fix starts up again at the same spot a few months later, as has happened all over the city. And when this is happening in many places well away from any restaurants, the government's claim that restaurants dumping grease into the drains are responsible is less than convincing.

Plans to build subdivisions and kitschy tourist developments in national parks like Ancon Hill and Parque Soberania, and to destroy historic sites like the colonial-era Camino de Cruces do not amuse the neighbors.

People sold homes on the former US military bases via former ARI director and fraudulent Noriega-era president Nicolas Ardito Barletta's pitch that they were buying into "garden communities," only to be later told that there's too much green area in their communities and that their new neighbors will be high rises that cut off the wind and block the sun are not amused. That many of the applicable urban development laws, including some that were promulgated by Balbina Herrera as Housing Minister, were flouted by Balbina and her ministry, only adds salt to the wounds.

And are citizens mollified with the satisfying news that the city will get new park land and a solution to its traffic jams by the construction of the Cinta Costera? Well, consider that the original plan was for a landfill to add parkland along the waterfront, but now the Torrijos administration intends to put a busy street on it as a purported traffic solution that no qualified urban planning expert has been so self-destructive of his or her own reputation to endorse. Consider that after a whole exercise in pre-qualifying bidders, Torrijos ignored the low qualified bid and went with the hoodlum Brazilian company Odebrecht --- the central player in a scandal that forced the ouster of a Brazilian president and the employer of a murderous goon squad in Colon. Consider that the project will pay to take Hermann Bern's folly --- a marina in an enclosed area where the sewage pipes come out near his Hotel Miramar --- off of the developer's hands for a handsome profit, and that the Club de Yates y Pesca will likewise be fabulously compensated for land it obtained from the government long ago (for which it never bothered to pay), and that the net result of the cessions of land on the Cinta Costera to Bern and the Club de Yates y Pesca will be the division of the promised waterfront public park by a big stretch of fenced-off private property.

So yes, Balbina has developer money for her presidential campaign. And, just when it seemed that the Supreme Court would strike down Law 12 of 2007, which purported to legalize Balbina Herrera's violations of such laws as the Law 21 of 1997 zoning rules for the Reverted Areas, the long-standing prohibition against development in national parks, zoning changes without public hearings and so on, Pedro Miguel González and the National Assembly came to her rescue again.

The deputies passed Law 29 of 2008, which again purports to legalize all the Housing Ministry's (MIVI's) illegalities and declare all the former Canal Zone construction projects that Balbina attempted to jam through as "social interest" projects exempt from the law. President Torrijos signed it and it became law on June 2.

Law 29 is being challenged in court by the same people who challenged Law 12 of 2007, plus by some opposition legislators who may figure that actually opposing the PRD administration for a change might help their chances of getting elected again in 2009. The lawsuits were expected.

What was unusual is the outpouring of middle class protest. No, they are not blocking major traffic arteries and fighting pitched battles with riot police. They're in many cases even wary of naming Balbina Herrera as their nemesis. But they're taking to the streets in many different neighborhoods, and the network of alliances is getting tighter.

At Albrook Heights, they don't like the condo towers that former PRD Vice President Pipo Virzi plans to build at the end of a dead-end street next to the Bridge of the Americas. At Clayton, they object to the change in density rules that will allow a series of 10-story apartment towers, without any provision for improvements of the area's already overburdened water, sewer, drainage and traffic infrastructures. The people at the former Fort Davis on the Atlantic side don't like the idea of the forested areas near their houses being razed for more Colon Free Zone warehouses and container parking. Virtually everywhere in the old Canal Zone residents are insisting that no more forests be destroyed by developers and no substantial projects be built without the corresponding water, sewer and road improvements to support them.

The problem isn't just in the Reverted Areas, either. The neighbors in Paitilla and El Cangrejo have been mobilized for awhile, and now people on Via Porras near Parque Omar are also up in arms about proposed new high rises adding to already annoying infrastructure woes.

So yes, Balbina's getting her money from developers. But the pickets are out and her scofflaw tenure at MIVI is being raised as a campaign issue.