Homes with a view
WHEN your dream home comes to mind, do you see a compact space in a high-rise in the middle of the city, or do you picture a bungalow with a porch and a garden you can start or end your days in? In Asia, it’s the latter that probably matches most people’s idea of a dream home. “There’s a strong cultural reference here against high-rise (housing), perhaps more than anywhere in the world,” Professor Daniel Webster said in a forum last Friday on metropolitan management. “But if you have five million people, I don’t think you have much of a choice. Besides, so much of your land is prone to hazards, like landslides.”
There just isn’t enough land in Cebu for everyone to have single-detached houses with yard space for play and hobbies, or at least to keep the street noise at bay.
Across the street from where Webster gives his talk, one of Cebu’s grandest old houses sits, full of polished hardwood and stories about how people used to live. Inside the discussion hall, however, the professor tells us something we’ve been dreading: vertical housing development is all but inevitable.
He tried to make it sound workable. In the eight-storey building in Bangkok that he shares with 41 other households, “half of them hate me and half of them like me, which makes it a community,” he quipped. Someone from the audience volunteered that high-rise living isn’t at all a bad idea. “When in Cebu, I enjoy gardening,” she said. “But when someplace else like London, for example, I enjoy my view of the city.”
I’m not yet convinced. Yes, there’s a lot of sense in living as close to one’s workplace as possible, if only to avoid spending an hour or more on the road, fuming in the midst of traffic. But often, the urban high-rise spaces that will fit one’s budget are barely big enough to hold a bed, a tiny bathroom, and a kitchenette. You’d have to choose between a small bookcase and a small dining table that hugs the wall.
There’s a show on TV that features young Westerners fitting all their worldly possessions in “tiny houses.” Tiny, of course, is relative. What the show’s producers consider “tiny”—anywhere from 10 to 22 square meters of floor space—will hold one to three families in Cebu’s informal settlements or inner cities. But what saves these tiny houses on that TV show is the view that often surrounds them. Plunk a tiny house in a meadow with wildflowers and a pretty stream, and you have yourself an idyll.
In the right locations, the views from a medium- or high-rise residential building may be terrific. But once other buildings rise beside it, that view of fog-draped hills or the city’s lights or its changeable sunsets will be replaced by a view of the next building’s walls. Not exactly edifying, unless you enjoy staring at (or into) other people’s windows.
Perhaps I’m just being a fuddy-duddy about this, but high-rise housing seems to be built for the young, most of whose ambitions are firmly anchored on the city and its busy streets. I know there are environmental and practical benefits to living like that, high above the heart of the city, but the doubts I house are more than tiny.