Baguio, kanino ka lang? Uliber-
It isn’t clear nowadays who Baguio truly is for if you look at the big picture. Developments indicate a sustained shift toward a high-impact economy with high-impact infrastructure.
Kitam dyay market. It’s functioning fairly okay, fires notwithstanding (and those can be dealt with in other ways).
But the headline buried in the apathy of the past 6-7 years is that the market is increasingly likely to be taken over by SM Prime Holdings in the form of a “modernized” market, which, well, we can assume is a mall.
More condos going up, to be bought by the high-net-worth individual lowlanders who won’t live in it and will instead rent ‘em out to other less-high-net-worth individual lowlanders in need of temporary vacation bed-n-breakfasts.
When I first came to Baguio a fresh-faced idiot child, the foremost thing that came to mind was the overwhelmingly cold and the fresh pine-scented breeze. Now, a decade and a half-odd years removed, the main thing I feel in Baguio the light bends before my eyes is the overwhelming presence of capital.
Baguio has increasingly felt like it is more for two crowds rather than the locals that have been here since time immemorial. The crowd of the high-net-worth individual, and the temporary tourist (there is an overlap).
The police office issued an advisory on the 29th where they advised people to not go out for “non-essential trips” to not exacerbate the worsening traffic situation where langya isang oras Baguio to Baguio—and the very clear implied message here is: residents, adjust.
Tourists come first. Wait until they’re gone.
Your city is not yours. You are not the priority.
Kanino ka lang, Baguio?
Not an unwarranted sentiment. The populace has long grown into an increasing sense of alienation in their own home, as resources increasingly get allocated into catering to a subset of the populace that continues to shrink.
Water is stretched out. Garbage is piling up. Cost of living—Baguio is gentrifying.
Even as an isolate snippet of the national economy, Baguio is getting more expensive as high-rise after high-rise comes up.
Eventually, this will come to a head—because even if the justification is that the tourists drive the economy, what use is the economy of a city if its people do not share in it? If its people cannot benefit from it?
Kanino ka lang?
