Story by Khim Joshua Raymundo and Chazel Pastrana
Seven years into being a kiosk vendor, 49-year-old UP workers' union officer Allan Cayabyab faces a heartbreaking situation: his kiosk and home are in danger of being relocated to a food hub with higher rental fees.
“With the food hub, they will gradually kill our livelihood. They’re going to increase rental fees until we would not be able to pay,” Cayabyab said.
Modernization is one of the primary goals of the University of the Philippines (UP) administration, and its Master Development Plan (MDP) is the project intended to develop the campus through infrastructures and commercialization.
Different sectors in UP will be affected by this plan, particularly the kiosk vendors and former Shopping Center (SC) stall owners. In 2018, the UP Business Concessions Office (BCO), in charge of managing administration-vendors relations, refused to renew the vendors’ permit to operate to manage their ingress in the university.
UP President Danilo Concepcion said during last year’s Nov. 9 Board of Regents (BOR) meeting that he wanted to regulate the entrance of vendors into the campus as he did not want UP Diliman to become a “palengke.”
The UP administration’s plans to set up a food hub on campus near the College of Fine Arts where kiosks are said to be relocated raised concerns among UP vendors as well. Student Regent Ivy Taroma expressed during the same meeting that this would cause competition among the vendors.
Cayabyab currently pays a monthly fee of P350 for his kiosk, but he said that the rental fee at the food hub might increase up to P5,000 since it is a commercial establishment.
He said UP BCO Director Raquel Florendo told them in a dialogue that UP will have a 10 percent share in their daily earnings.
Cayabyab was concerned about the students since they will be the most affected as their primary customers.
“If there will be an increase in rental fees, we will be forced to increase the prices of our goods. Could the students afford that?” he said.
University Student Council (USC) Community Rights and Welfare Head Nicole Reasonda pointed out several issues with relocating kiosks in one place.
“They sell almost the same food, right? So how do you think that will look like? Not to mention that the location is not really a place students would often go to,” she said in a phone interview.
On the other hand, Cayabyab said that even though UP BCO has not renewed vendors’ permit to operate, they are still temporarily allowed to continue their livelihood.
He added that the UP administration could easily evict vendors any time they want because vendors do not have permits.
“What we’re holding on to is we are continuously paying rental fees, and they continue on receiving payment from us,” he said in Filipino.
A year after
Former SC stall owners also continue to voice out their concerns about the assurance of their livelihood inside the campus after a fire hit the establishment in March 2018.
It has been over a year since the blazing fire consumed UP Diliman’s SC, causing an underwhelming estimate of P500,000 worth of damages, according to the Bureau of Fire Protection’s spot report on May 8, 2018.
The center used to house stalls selling varieties of food, supplies, and services. People often went there to buy food, get their hair cut, buy school supplies, and even have their keys duplicated.
D’ Holy Book, SC’s most well-known school and office supplies store, used to be a go-to store for students, professors, and UP employees before the stall was engulfed by the fire. It offered UP students school supplies such as pens, folders, index cards, and bluebooks they use during exams.
The stall is now located at the old tennis court behind the defunct center, along with other former SC stall owners. Myrna Gumban, owner of the D’ Holy Book, saw a massive drop in sales after the incident. The store went from earning P40,000 a week to just between P6,000 to P8,000 a week.
Despite being only a few meters away from the burned down center, customers found the walk to the old tennis court tiresome, Gumban said. Customers, she added, sometimes complained about how the temporary location was “too far from civilization.”
Aside from the dwindling sales, their lack of access to electricity is another problem. With only generators and solar panels as sources of electricity, stall owners continue to endure the heat in their temporary stalls.
“Just recently each stall owner here gave P10,000 to BCO for electrical wires, but we’re still not sure when exactly we will have electricity,” Gumban said.
She added that an estimated P598,000 will then be needed for the electrical installation.
“We’re worried about how much we’re spending, especially since this is only a temporary location,” Gumban said.
During the BOR meeting, Concepcion said the BCO had been instructed to process the electrical connection of the vendors located at the old tennis court.
Reasonda, however, said the BCO and former SC stall owners only reached a verbal agreement about the electricity issue.
“In recent dialogues, verbally the BCO is allowing them to install electricity, but that’s just verbal. The problem there is, what if the UP administration suddenly questions them about it? They have no documents to prove that the university really did allow them to install electricity,” she said.
Plan to modernize
Details about the plans to rehabilitate the SC into a “more modern structure,” as said by Concepcion during last year’s Apr. 6 BOR meeting, and the possible relocation of kiosks in different locations remain questionable for Reasonda.
“Their mode here is gentrification. They want to improve the UP campus without regard for the sectors that have long been servicing the university,” Reasonda said.
Concepcion said in the Nov. 9 BOR meeting that SC owners and vendors will be given priority in the granting of slots for businesses. However, this remains to be seen as the UP administration’s plans for the SC rehabilitation and UP vendors’ relocation are still underway.
Cayabyab asserted that the UP administration should prioritize the livelihood of its constituents rather than making the university campus physically beautiful.
“We, vendors, had been part of the UP community for a very long time. While the administration is so busy modernizing the campus, they are leaving us behind,” Cayabyab said.
Above The Fold tried to reach out to BCO, but the office has not responded yet as of writing.
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