CITY Planning and Development Officer Donna Tabangin said on a streamed briefing last Saturday that an audit by the local government showed around 25 percent of audited structures in the city were made without a building permit.
According to Tabangin, approximately 51,000 buildings are present within Baguio’s 57.5 square kilometer territory, of which roughly one-fourth have no building permits.
The current audit of the city’s buildings is only 56 percent done, she said.
Tabangin said that the city is planning stricter measures for business and building permits as the city is heading towards “urban decay,” citing a poor situation in terms of solid waste, forest cover, road network, and water supply, among other aspects of urban management.
The study cited was a 2019 study by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), which warned of “irreversible urban decay” by 2043.
“Urban decay means the city will give up on us, the city cannot sustain our activities. Without corrections, we will reach that irreversible urban decay by 2043… or even earlier, we don’t know how nature will get back at us.” Tabangin said.
Tabangin previously revealed that the NEDA study projected that the resident population of Baguio City will exceed 600,000 by 2043, not counting the daytime tourist population, which prior to the pandemic had the city reached more than 1.5 million concurrent population.
Currently, the city’s population is roughly 366,000, more than half of the projected resident population, still more than two decades away.
Under the standards set by the United Nations, an individual is entitled to have 110 square meters of land for settlement or development and 0.15 cubic meters of water supply per day, with 20 square meters of open space, 40 square meters of urban road, 80 square meters of green cover and 40 square meters of forest cover.
However, the growing population of the city has long since exceeded the point where such standards could be met.
At the same time, the city has exceeded the prescribed threshold for solid and liquid waste output per individual as early as 1994, and the city’s garbage output continues to increase.
