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Everyone is proclaiming that riverbank settlers must not be allowed to return and rebuild their shelters. Yet, the settlers are doing exactly that. Why? Are they simply stubborn and oblivious to danger? Or is there something the rest of us do not understand about their survival strategies?

My visit to a devastated Tullahan River community – below Quezon City’s North Fairview Bridge – in the aftermath of “Ondoy’s” flash floods offered some insights. A bevy of barangay (village) officials in their crisp bright-blue uniforms set off by yellow piping – a dramatic contrast to the faded and damp clothing of the flood victims – was striding around what was left of the settlement. Two of them had posted themselves prominently on an enormous rock that commanded a panoramic view of the settlement. Eyeing clusters of busy residents, the officials appeared to be making sure that no surreptitious attempts at housing reconstruction were underway.

The lively if sober scene featured young women and children washing mud-caked clothes with or without soap, immersed knee-deep in shallow pools along the edge of the brown and refuse-strewn river. Young girls were arranging spaces on makeshift clotheslines to hang up the “clean” laundry. Mothers were bathing stark-naked shivering toddlers with water from a source one didn’t even want to contemplate. The men were mainly fixing something –a chair, a table, a stove – or simply sitting around and talking. Were they perhaps waiting for the barangay team to leave so they could continue repairing their devastated homes?

Aling Edna (pseudonym) told us how she and her neighbors had attempted to construct temporary shelters on a vacant 2.4-hectare expanse of private land above them. But no sooner had they put up their structures than barangay officials were tearing them down. This was private property, scolded the demolition crew. Lamented Aling Edna: “Why does our government allow a single family to hold so much unused land nearby, while thousands of us here are struggling to find a place where we can simply rest and begin restoring our lives?”

Their leaders elaborated: “Most of the year, living along the waterways is fine. If we had any other choice like better land nearby, we would surely go for it. But we don’t. So, we do the best we can living here, working hard to make a better life in the city, feeding our children and sending them to school. Typhoons come and go but we are used to them. We usually move the women, children and older people to the schoolhouse to wait out the wind and rain. Some of us stay behind to guard our houses and possessions. When the weather clears up, we return, assess the damage and start cleaning up, try to get relief goods while reconstructing our houses, and go back to our hanapbuhay (livelihood) as soon as we can. Ondoy took us by surprise though, like everyone else. The waters rose so quickly!

“Danger zone? Maybe. But living on the river is not as dangerous as being forced into faraway resettlement sites where there is no work. The government dumps thousands of us there with insufficient food, water, health services, schools, sanitation, street lights, cheap transportation, but especially no hanapbuhay. We cannot survive there. Yet, they still want us to amortize units that most of us cannot afford and never wanted in the first place!”

The collective trauma wreaked by tropical storm Ondoy should at last force us to confront the questions that 3 million poor informal settlers in Metro Manila have been raising for decades: “Why is there no place in this city for us to live legally and productively as the hardworking, upstanding people we are? We may be poor, but we pay taxes every time we buy something. And without our services, the city couldn’t operate!”

For urban poor people, living near their sources of income is central to their survival strategies. Onsite security of tenure thus commands a far higher priority for them than housing. Nonetheless, government insists that houses in well laid-out communities are their primary need, even if these are far outside the city and offer no work opportunities. Housing officials extol the number of units built in Bulacan, Cavite and Laguna as “filling the housing backlog.” But they say nothing of the misery they have inflicted upon thousands of evicted families driven away from their livelihoods in the city to face economic uncertainty; or about family displacement and the additional threats to the poor’s already precarious existence.

NGOs and people’s organizations, supported by the United Nations Habitat, have for decades advocated as most humane and economically efficient, community proposals for onsite secure tenure and upgrading according to people’s plans, together with low interest housing loans that allow for incremental construction. Examples of successful demand-driven schemes abound in “Presidential Proclamation sites,” like Sama-Sama in Commonwealth, Quezon City, and areas covered by the Community Mortgage Program and the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines. Private sector efforts like Gawad Kalinga and Habitat International likewise affirm the locational imperative.

If millions of poor Filipinos are to have a place in the city, a deeper set of issues must now surface. These concern land values, land availability, concepts of ownership, LGU responsibilities and the right to the city. Ondoy reminded us it is time to take stock and get serious about urban land reform.

There are vacant lands in many of Metro Manila’s constituent cities, but they are not available for housing the metropolis’ low-income workforce. Contributing to this skewed situation are low idle-land taxation rates, rising land values, obsolete ownership laws and inappropriate institutional set-ups.

The result is helter-skelter city planning that allocates available land to malls, upscale residential subdivisions and commercial uses, thus bringing in higher tax collections and, possibly, more corruption while ignoring the needs of millions of urban poor families.

The recent calamity was a wake-up call for government policy planners. Before relegating riverbank dwellers to housing units in Bulacan and Laguna, officials need to listen to and discuss real options with the one-third of the metropolitan citizenry victimized by the flash floods. It is time to clear our societal channels of the debris formed by obsolete rules and outlooks, and regenerate ourselves as a fast-flowing mainstream force toward social reform. As hardworking but marginalized residents, the urban poor form our metropolis’ workforce. As Filipino citizens, they are entitled to live in it, like everyone else. That is the message of Ondoy.

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