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In-city resettlement for Ondoy's victims

by Mary Racelis
Philippine Daily Inquirer
November 1, 2009

In a determined drive to accuse someone of “Ondoy’s” killer floods, critics eagerly point to informal settlers living on Metro Manila’s creeks and riverbanks “They are the cause of our clogged waterways! We cannot allow them to return to the former homes.”

That kind of rhetoric gives often single-minded national housing officials and their LGU counterparts exactly the justification they seek to evict 80,000 poor families from their riverbank, creekside, lakeshore and coastal dwelling places. What alternatives do the authorities offer? (1) Distant resettlement with meager livelihood prospects, inadequate basic services, and increased dependency, or (2) cash compensation that all too soon thrusts the family back into poverty, or (3) Balik Probinsiya, even though most informal settlers are now Metro Manila born and have no province to return to!

A reply to critics, then, would firmly assert that riverbank settlers would not return to their insecure environments if they had better options!

After all, they were no less traumatized than middle-class villagers who clung to their rooftops that fateful Saturday night. Unlike wealthier victims, however, the urban poor displaced by Ondoy lack the option of renting elsewhere or sharing space temporarily with relatives in already overcrowded shanties. Nor do densely packed emergency centers offer them long-term solutions. In contrast, returning gives them a semblance of normality and control over their lives. They are once again near their livelihoods, children’s schools, health clinics, hospitals and the market. Once again they can move on with their lives.

The return is also about reintegrating into a community where relatives, neighbors and friends help one another. When poor people cannot rely on their government to defend their right to live and work in the city, they compensate by creating caring communities in disaster-prone spaces. Ironically, their being an active but lowly paid workforce in a buyer’s market means in effect that they subsidize the comfortable lifestyles of better-off urban residents.

Charges that informal dwellers are the primary polluters of creeks and rivers are easily dismissed by noting the factory wastes discharged into rivers, silt carried downstream from denuded mountainsides and effluents coming from rich and poor neighborhoods alike in our still predominantly sewer-less cities. The urban poor are easy to blame though. As one riverside woman protested graphically, “Why do they always say we pollute the Pasig? We eat so little that what we dump into the river is only a tiny fraction of the wastes coming from upstream!”

Why indeed do 40 percent of Metro Manila’s population live on an estimated 5 percent of the land? And that mostly in disaster-prone areas? Vacant lots lie visibly unoccupied nearby. But, since taxes on idle land are low, with no time limits on how much land can be left unused in anticipation of rising values, owners keep their plots idle as long as they wish. Confiscated non-performing land assets lie virtually abandoned by banks, former owners, or the government, along with similarly idle government lands. These would offer ample space for self-help housing and medium-rise buildings if they were creatively freed up for those uses.

Many sympathetic housing officials are in fact well aware that distant resettlement is not the answer and that in-city resettlement would be a far better solution for urban worker families. But they too are stymied by a legal system that does not easily generate affordable land in the city for housing the urban poor. The task of finding land really rests with local authorities, who are closer to the problem and who have an obligation to cater to their constituents. National government housing agencies can support these efforts through financial incentives to LGUs able to identify social housing spaces within city boundaries and to prepare them quickly for their riverside citizenry. Perhaps the violence wreaked by Ondoy on their voters and the latter’s growing clamor in an election year for safe resettlement near their creek and river sites will at last force the issue.

What can be done immediately for the 400,000 waterway dwellers engulfed by Ondoy? LGUs can negotiate with owners of idle non-performing private and public land within city boundaries to free up space for initially temporary relocation. With emergency financial assistance from the national government, LGUs can then lay out these vacant in-city resettlement sites, put basic services in place and encourage settlers to rebuild their structures there incrementally, helping them with construction materials and tools. Formal upgrading with stronger structures can get underway later, assisted by participatory planning. Meanwhile, local authorities would designate and prepare permanent social housing sites in the city for less flood-afflicted but similarly needy settler families in accordance with the Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992 (RA 7279).

The time has come to create inclusive cities that will offer our urban poor working families decent living conditions near their places of work. No longer will these nearly five million men, women and children currently living in informal settlements have to make inhuman choices between illegality on degraded sites in the city or destructive legality outside the city. If urban land reform does not get underway soon, burgeoning informal settlements compounded by future riverside tragedies will continue to dramatize social injustice perpetuated in “the only Christian country in Asia.”

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