The lack of evidence-based planning has led to the country’s housing mess, according to the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC).
Vice President and HUDCC Chairman Maria Leonor G. Robredo also said on Wednesday previous administrations were fixated on just building houses and not in “changing lives.”
“Iyong pinakaproblema po natin sa housing ngayon, hindi lang kulang sa pera, pero kulang talaga sa appreciation ng pagkakaroon ng evidence-based planning. Kulang talaga sa appreciation ng paghahanda sa susunod [Our main problem in the housing sector is not just the lack of financial resources but more so on the failure of evidence-based planning. We may have also failed to anticipate],” Robredo said.
She added: “When I was looking at the accomplishment reports, parang ang lahat yata ng [it seems that all] accomplishment reports [are all] about the number of houses built pero para sa akin hindi yata iyon accomplishment. Para sa akin ano lang ’yon, it’s a program. But the accomplishment really is how many lives were changed.”
Robredo said the lack of planning has resulted in poor climate-change disaster-risk reduction measures (DRRM) in many local communities.
The vice president said that, while local governments had disaster-risk and management programs, these were put in place just for the sake of complying to the rules.
This has led her to conclude that whatever limited authority was given to the HUDCC in terms of housing and urban development was not maximized by previous administrations.
“Disaster preparedness is really measured on how well you have incorporated disaster-related plans in your local development plans. Parang if you look at all the DRRM plans of most of the local government units, most of the budget goes to relief operations. And we are more interested in the prevention aspect than in the reactive aspect of disaster preparedness,” Robredo said.
Given these, Robredo welcomed the conduct of a project that will help three cities in Metro Manila craft DRRM plans and programs.
This will be done through the €1 million-worth Moving Urban Poor Communities Toward Resilience project, funded by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department.
This project will be implemented in Quezon City, Valenzuela City and Malabon City, all in Metro Manila, for 18 months covering four barangays per city with a total number of 30,000 urban-poor individual beneficiaries in 12 urban barangays.
The project aims to improve Alternative Temporary Shelter (ATS) solutions for the urban poor in the targeted cities; increase the resilience of urban-poor communities in ATS and livelihood; and strengthen city through institutionalized policies and mechanisms for urban- poor disaster resilience.
Earlier, despite the “housing crisis,” the Duterte administration has chosen to further cut the government’s budget for housing and community-development projects and programs.
Based on the proposed General Appropriations Act for 2017, the government has allocated only P15.363 billion, or 0.46 percent of the proposed national budget for next year.
This is lower than the P33.481- billion allocation for 2016 and P29.063-billion allocation for 2015 under the previous administration.
Budget Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno earlier told the BusinessMirror that the lower budget was due to the absence of funding for homes in Yolanda-affected provinces.
Based on the housing budget, the Duterte administration has allocated P12.6 billion for the National Housing Authority to relocate informal settlers from danger zones and those affected by infrastructure projects.
This is on top of the P1.7-billion provision for the Socialized Housing Finance Corp. and the National Home Mortgage Finance Corp. to aid in providing socialized housing.