Part One
SINCE the late-1970s, several attempts have been made to meet the public’s demand for housing and land, especially within the country’s major cities.
These efforts were summarized in a World Bank report that was published on June 14.
The report, which was entitled “Closing the Gap in Affordable Housing in the Philippines: Policy Paper for the National Summit on Housing and Urban Development,” included a section that focused on evolution of the National Shelter Program (NSP).
Several public companies responsible for housing production, public financing and regulating land use were created over the next several years in an attempt to implement the NSP.
The NSP, which has been in existence since 1978, was intended to provide affordable homes to the poor and disadvantaged.
In their book, government senior researchers Gilberto M. Llanto and Aniceto C. Orbeta defined the NSP as the government’s “comprehensive strategy to address the country’s housing problems.”
Llanto and Orbeta said the NSP rests on three basic principles that defined the role of the players in addressing these problems: the beneficiaries, the private sector and the government. The authors said the NSP expects the private sector as the “principal player” and the government as only a “catalyst.” To implement the NSP, Llanto and Orbeta cited its four major programs: production of housing units, mortgage and financing, development loans and community programs.
The NSP, through these programs, was expected “to extend housing assistance to a total of 323,700 families for the period 1993 to May 1995,” Llanto and Orbeta said in their book, titled The State of Philippine Housing Programs: A Critical Look at How Philippine Housing Subsidies Work.
The figure represents 26 percent of the targeted nearly 1.3 million households for the years 1993 to 1998.
However, after nearly four decades, a housing backlog still exists.
What happened?
1975 to 1985
PUBLICLY available records show that under the Marcos administration, two agencies were specifically created to implement the measures cited above. The first was the National Housing Authority (NHA), which was created on October 15, 1975. Later, on June 2, 1978, the Ministry of Human Settlements (MHS) was established. The NHA became one of the agencies under the MHS.
Nine days after the MHS was created, President Ferdinand E. Marcos issued Presidential Decree (PD) 1517, otherwise known as the Urban Land Reform Act (Ulra). This decree empowered the MHS to “prepare the appropriate development and zoning plans” to implement the Ulra. Under this law, “no urban land can be disposed of or used or constructed on, unless its disposition or use conforms with the development and zoning plans of the MHS.”
Additionally, PD 1517 was meant to regulate “existing pattern of land use and ownership in urban and urbanizable areas.”
Among the projects implemented under the MHS at that time were a series of projects known as the Bagong Lipunan Improvement of Sites and Services, or Bliss, and the Dagat-Dagatan housing projects.
The Bliss project was a series of medium-rise tenement housing units, while the Dagat-Dagatan project was designed to transform the swamp in Manila Bay, where thousands of squatter families lived, into a modern housing model.
The transformation of the squatter site was part of the Marcos administration’s urban-reform showcase that was said to have been funded by loans obtained from the World Bank.
However, further MHS housing projects were halted when the Marcos administration was overthrown in 1986. The MHS was disbanded, and the NHA became one of the agencies under the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC).
Rise of the HUDCC
THE World Bank report said since the 1980s, the Philippines’s housing policy “has been embodied in a National Shelter Program that features a total systems approach to housing finance, production and regulation” through a “network of implementing housing agencies.”
Thus, the HUDCC was created. The HUDCC had several “key shelter agencies” attached to help implement the NSP.
Aside from the NHA, other agencies attached to the HUDCC included the National Home Mortgage Finance Corp. (NHMFC), Home Guaranty Corp. (HGC), Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) and the Social Housing Finance Corp. (SHFC).
Each agency has a primary responsibility.The NHA had the mandate to build homes for low-income families, specifically for those belonging to the lowest 30 percent of urban income earners, while the NHMFC was tasked to operate a “viable home-mortgage market and attract private institutional funds into long-term housing mortgages.”
The HGC had the responsibility of providing “risk covers and financial incentives to housing credits extended by developers, banks and other financing institutions,” while the HLURB is charged with regulating land-use planning and housing development.
Later, in 2004, another agency was added. This was the SHFC, which became a subsidiary of the NHMFC. The SHFC, which was established through Executive Order 272, became the lead government agency responsible for undertaking “social-housing programs that will cater to the formal and informal sectors in the low-income bracket.” The SHFC also became responsible for the Community Mortgage Program (CMP), which was a mortgage-financing program designed to assist “legally organized associations of underprivileged and homeless citizens to purchase and develop a tract of land under the concept of community ownership.”
The CMP’s primary objective was to help “residents of blighted areas own the lots they occupy.”
Original NSP
THE original National Shelter Program (NSP) of 1978 was transformed into an
ambitious six-year program in 1986. Its overall goal was to give low-income or marginalized households a chance to obtain decent, affordable and secure shelter.
However, the program’s life span proved too short.
This program was effectively extended with the enactment of two laws, namely, the Urban Development and Housing Act (Udha) of 1992 (Republic Act [RA] 7279) and the Comprehensive and Integrated Shelter Financing Act of 1994 (RA 7835).
According to the World Bank document, the Udha was enacted to “uplift conditions of underprivileged and homeless citizens in urban areas and resettlement areas by making available to them decent housing at affordable cost.” This was essentially a socialized-housing program.
The other law, RA 7835, increased the regular appropriation to the NSP and augmented the capital of the NHMFC and the HGC.
Falling short
ACCORDING to the World Bank report, the NSP had fallen short in meeting its avowed goals despite the combined efforts of the past administrations.
The World Bank report said these efforts “fell short of making a significant dent in housing provision, more so in the improvement of the situation of urban-poor communities and informal settlements.”
“The current housing program remains inadequate and unable to provide the scale and quality needed to match the magnitude of the housing problem,” the report said.
Citing data from the 2010 Census of Population and Housing, the World Bank report noted that there was an accumulated backlog of 1.225 million housing units as of January 2011.
About “787,731 units are households in ‘unacceptable housing’ and another 437,612 are households doubling up in acceptable structures,” the World Bank report said.
“There is also a future need of 2.25 million for new household formation and 1.93 million for inventory losses over the period 2011 to 2016, although ‘future need’ does not constitute a housing shortfall per se,” the report added.
The report also predicted that these “figures will inevitably increase, as the country’s good macroeconomic performance results in higher demand for land and housing in urban and urbanizing areas.”
“Since the supply of urban land is finite and has intensifying competing demands, its allocation and use becomes a critical focus of public policy,” the report said. “The dysfunctions of land and property markets and the gravely inadequate transportation system are not strategically addressed.”
“This suggests a formulation bereft of an urbanization framework that should have informed the national and local development planning and investment decision-making,” the report added.
The World Bank report explained that one of the stumbling blocks was the HUDCC’s “limited powers to influence the urbanization process.”
“The government’s development planning and budgeting are done more on a sectoral manner, with the priorities of Cabinet-level agencies taking precedence over coordinative and intersectoral initiatives and mechanisms,” the report said.
The NSP faced even more challenges in the provinces.
“Provincial governments are limited in their powers and capacities for planning and integration,” the World Bank report said. “Provinces are themselves crippled by their lack of effective planning integration authority over component cities/municipalities [i.e., central government funding can bypass provinces and go directly to component cities and municipalities] and, perversely, have no administrative or fiscal authority over highly urbanized cities within their geographical boundaries.”
The World Bank report identified four strategic areas that prevent effective solutions to the housing problem.
“These are land, financing, governance and urbanization processes,” the report said. “Urbanization is the context by which the housing problem has to be appreciated. Clearly, urban development in many cities and localities are not properly planned and managed.”
“Near-city and off-city relocation and displacement of informal-settler families become doubly problematic or complicated because of the lack of connective infrastructure,” the report added. “Transportation systems are absent or badly planned. Poor investments in the improvement, expansion and management of transportation infrastructure prevent lagging localities from participating in the development of urban centers.”
The World Bank report pointed out that the government still insisted in relocating urban-poor dwellers, despite the “high attrition rate in government resettlement projects.”
“There is a proliferation of informal dwellings; instead of organized densification, more spaces are utilized without following a coherent land-use plan,” the report said. “Planning coordination among local government units is lacking or weak, compromising land-use compatibility or integration across localities and resulting in inefficiency of basic services for transportation and traffic management.”
To be continued
Image credits: Nonie Reyes