Metro Manila’s Undervalued Neighborhoods

Metro Manila is often described through its gleaming towers, gated villages, and sprawling malls. But within the same metropolis, millions live in conditions that rarely make it into the city’s promotional materials. About 3.7 million people in the Philippines are homeless or living in informal settlements, with up to half a million concentrated in Metro Manila alone. These are the city’s undervalued neighborhoods — not undervalued in the sense of being undiscovered real estate plays, but undervalued in how they are treated by markets, policy, and public perception. Residents of Baseco Compound, Happyland, and Sitio San Roque navigate a daily reality of precarious housing, limited services, and constant pressure from development forces that rarely see their communities as part of the city’s future.

These figures are not static. The forces that create and sustain informal settlements — job-seeking migration, displacement from public construction projects, the absence of basic services, and a formal housing market that has priced out lower-income families — continue to operate. Understanding why these neighborhoods remain undervalued means looking beyond stigma and examining the structural dynamics that keep them marginalized.

The Three Dimensions of Being Undervalued

These three dimensions reinforce each other. Poor water access and waste management degrade living conditions, which lowers property values and deepens stigma, which in turn justifies further exclusion from formal housing and infrastructure investment. The cycle is not accidental — it is the outcome of market forces and policy choices that treat these neighborhoods as problems to be managed rather than communities to be integrated.

What the PIDS Study Reveals About Displacement

A study from the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) titled “Urban Revitalization and Shelter Inadequacy” puts hard numbers on a pattern many residents already know. Land values in revitalized districts increased by an average of 500 to 600 percent within a three-kilometer radius. As these areas become more attractive to capital, new construction tilts almost entirely toward high-end condominiums, while socialized and economic housing projects are pushed to Regions III and IV-A — farther from the jobs, schools, and hospitals that make city living viable.

The study also points to a gap in the Urban Development and Housing Act (UDHA). While the law requires developers to contribute to socialized housing, it fails to ensure that such housing is spatially integrated within urban districts. The result is a city that grows more segregated: wealth concentrates in revitalized cores, while lower-income communities are pushed to the periphery, where access to opportunity is thinner. The researchers recommend moving away from reliance on land revenues, mandating mixed-income planning in all revitalization projects, and exploring community land trusts to keep landownership out of the speculative market.

Daily Life in the Gaps

Water That Costs More, Delivers Less

Water privatization in Metro Manila began in 1997 and improved overall service levels, including modernized toilet facilities in schools and many households. But in informal settlements, the improvement stops at the boundary. Residents in Baseco Compound pay Php 40 per meter of water hose — far above what regulated utility customers pay — because private water meters only reach the edge of the settlement. Some families pay peddlers up to Php 50 per 200-liter drum. The National Economic and Development Authority estimates that 8.4 percent of Filipino households still rely on potentially unsafe sources: unprotected wells, surface water, rainwater, or water purchased from peddlers.

Waste That Has No Place to Go

Metro Manila generated 9,500 tons of garbage per day in 2020, a figure projected to reach 10,400 tons by 2025. The region accounts for about 25 percent of all waste collected nationwide. Up to 15 percent of that waste ends up in canals, estuaries, and rivers, eventually reaching Manila Bay. Only about 20 percent of Metro Manila’s barangays have a working materials recovery facility (MRF) — a barangay-owned or leased site where recyclables are processed. The shortage is attributed to limited and expensive land, making it hard for local governments to site these facilities. For settlements without formal waste collection, the result is daily exposure to garbage that accumulates in spaces where children play and families live.

Eviction and the Fight for Space

The pressure on informal settlements is not just economic — it is physical. In Sitio San Roque, an urban poor settlement of about 30,000 people, residents face a state-led eviction process pursued through coercion, community fragmentation, and surveillance. An urban poor leader quoted in the research described real estate developers treating residents “like pigs,” fencing off dwelling spaces and denying affordable housing. In early April 2020, 21 residents of another settlement were detained for voicing discontent and seeking aid to tackle hunger. Instances of local officials imprisoning quarantine violators in dog cages and coffins were also recorded. These are not isolated incidents — they are part of a pattern in which the right to the city is enforced differently depending on income.

What Can Actually Change

Policy Levers That Work

The PIDS researchers offer three concrete recommendations. First, national and local governments should move away from relying on land revenues and instead regulate rezoning of specific areas for affordable housing. Second, all revitalization projects should mandate mixed-income planning — meaning that when a district is redeveloped, a portion of the new housing must be affordable to lower-income households. Third, community land trusts should be explored as a mechanism to keep landownership out of the speculative real estate market. These are not abstract ideas; they have been implemented in various forms in other countries and could be adapted to the Philippine context.

Grassroots Wins

Community organizing has produced tangible results. The Metro Manila Vendors’ Alliance (MMVA) negotiated a Hawkers’ Holiday Moratorium that suspended clearing operations against street vendors from November 5, 2021, to January 15, 2022 — giving thousands of vendors a stable selling period during the Christmas season. In October 2021, a grassroots dialogue with the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority led to the recovery of two confiscated pedicab units and clarification of the legal process for retrieving confiscated vehicles. About 2,000 street vendors and urban poor residents were inoculated against COVID-19 through a vaccination drive enabled by the MMVA and the Quezon City local government. These wins are small relative to the scale of the problem, but they show that organized communities can shift institutional behavior.

What Individuals Can Do

For readers who live in Metro Manila and want to engage with these issues, the most direct action is to support organizations that work with urban poor communities. The research mentions the Metro Manila Vendors’ Alliance and the Save San Roque Alliance as grassroots groups that accept support and participation. Attending community consultations, amplifying the concerns of informal settler families in local government discussions, and questioning the assumption that “development” always means displacing the poor are all ways to shift the conversation. The Tindig Maralita project — an expanded multi-stakeholder initiative by the University of Melbourne’s Informal Urbanism Research Hub — is one example of how research, organizing, and advocacy can work together toward a just recovery.

Frequently Asked Questions

Metro Manila’s undervalued neighborhoods are not peripheral to the city’s story — they are central to it. The residents of Baseco, Happyland, and Sitio San Roque build the city’s infrastructure, sell its goods, and clean its streets. Whether they are allowed to remain in the city, and under what conditions, will determine whether Metro Manila’s growth is inclusive or extractive. The evidence is clear: without deliberate policy intervention, the gap will only widen. The PIDS study, the grassroots wins, and the community consultations all point in the same direction — the city works best when it works for everyone, not just those who can afford the highest bid.

If this was useful, you might also want to read our analysis of whether high-end village rental yields justify their price tags.

Sources

Pasig River Revival: Can This Iconic Location Spark a Real Estate Boom? — Explores the revitalization of the Pasig River corridor and what it means for surrounding communities, including displacement risks.

The Residences at Commonwealth: Family-Friendly Living Far From the Action — Examines how residential developments on Metro Manila’s periphery shape access to jobs and services.

Situating Slums. The GUIDON, 2024.

Upholding the Human Rights of Manila’s Urban Poor. Pursuit, University of Melbourne, 2022.

PIDS Study Warns of Widening Housing Gap as Metro Manila Land Values Soar. Manila Standard, 2024.