San Miguel Moved the Pasig River Expressway EIA. The Esteros Found Out Through a Repost.

The Pasig River Expressway revival under San Miguel Corporation has a new environmental impact assessment timetable, and the people scheduled to lose their homes for it learned about the change the same way they learn about brownouts: a screenshot in a group chat, reposted from a Facebook page that is not the barangay's.

That sequence is the story. A 19.37-kilometer elevated tollway is being routed over communities along the esteros and the riverbank, the developer adjusted its 2026 EIA schedule with the DENR-EMB, and the affected households are reading about it on their phones before any official notice reaches the barangay captain's desk.

The paperwork moves faster than the consultation

An EIA reschedule sounds procedural. For families in informal settlements along the Pasig, it sets the clock on every other deadline that matters: when the social preparation phase begins, when the census of affected persons closes, when relocation offers get tabled, when the demolition crew shows up with a court order.

The Philippine EIS System, on paper, requires public scoping and meaningful consultation with directly affected communities. The practice along major infrastructure corridors has been different for years, and the PAREX revival is running on the same template: notices that arrive late, hearings scheduled on workdays in venues people cannot reach, technical documents released in English without translated summaries.

San Miguel shelved it, then kept studying it

Ramon Ang publicly confirmed that San Miguel was shelving PAREX at a press conference on March 18, 2024, after months of pushback from heritage advocates, urban planners, and riverfront residents who criticized what an elevated tollway would do to the river rehabilitation effort and to the communities below it. Since that announcement, SMC has described the project's status as under continued viability study rather than fully withdrawn.

That distance between “shelved” and “still being studied” is where the current EIA timetable lives. A viability study that never closes leaves the corridor on the map, the alignment in the drawer, and the households inside it on standby. Toll concessionaires work on financing windows, and financing windows do not wait for barangay assemblies. The EIA reschedule is the first visible sign that the corporate timeline is again setting the pace for everyone downstream of it.

What relocation has meant before

The receipts on Metro Manila resettlement are not encouraging. Families moved out for the NLEX-SLEX connector, for North-South Commuter Rail right-of-way, and for earlier river rehabilitation programs ended up in Bulacan, Rizal, and Cavite sites with unfinished water lines, no transport links to the jobs they left behind, and monthly amortizations that arrived before the electricity did.

Community organizers along the esteros are already citing those precedents in their own Facebook posts, because that is where the conversation is happening. The DENR-EMB process assumes a public that reads bulletins. The public it is processing reads comments sections.

The asks are small and specific

Civil society groups working on PAREX have been consistent on what would make the next stage legible: the updated EIA timetable posted in Filipino at every affected barangay hall, scoping sessions held in the evenings and on weekends in the affected sitios, the full alignment map released with the names of every estero and street it crosses, and a written relocation plan with the receiving site, the unit size, the amortization schedule, and the transport allowance specified before any household signs anything.

None of that requires new legislation. It requires the developer and the regulator to treat the people under the proposed viaduct as parties to the project, not as a line item that gets moved when the calendar slips. Right now the calendar slipped, and the line item found out from a share button.