AMONG the cities in Metro Manila, Quezon City has the largest land area encompassing 16,121.8 square kilometers. What’s more, it is comfortably above sea level in most parts and safely removed from the Manila Bay, being a landlocked area.

Sure, it has its share of flash floods in several areas where the esteros and creeks overflow during storms and the monsoon season. But government neglect (both city and national) of the drainage systems is usually to blame for such floods, which are never as bad as the kind regularly suffered in the low-lying coastal towns of Malabon, Navotas, Caloocan, Parañaque and Manila.       

You might say Quezon City is the only one in Metro Manila that still “breathes easily” through its many open spaces and shrubbery. You can’t say the same for the rest of the cities of the metropolis.

Perhaps this is why out of a population of 2.7 million (2007 census), roughly 42 percent are illegitimate residents—or squatters. (The politically correct term, of course, is “informal settlers.” But, forgive me, why must we spare the sensibilities of those who are engaged in a patently illegal activity?)

That leaves 58 percent who regularly pay their utility bills and all sorts of city and national taxes. The property owners of the city also have to pay their “amillarmento” or real-estate tax to protect their Torrens title or deed over a property that, in some cases, had been handed down by forebears from way back when.

Quezon City, generally speaking, would be a nice location for a home for many people who aren’t too rich or too poor.

Unfortunately, QC has also attracted hordes of squatters since the early 1990s, including the worst kind there is, which are the professional ones. Squatting syndicates have mushroomed since the passage of Republic Act 7279, otherwise known as the Urban Development Act and Housing Act of 1992.

This law—which has become the bane of property owners throughout the country—is more commonly known as the “Lina Law,” named for former Sen. Jose “Joey” Lina Jr., its principal author.

Against this backdrop, there has emerged another controversial piece of legislation—really just a city ordinance—that would give the squatters in Quezon City socialized-housing benefits at the expense of legitimate property owners.

The ordinance, a brainchild of Councilor Edcel Lagman Jr., is known as the Socialized Housing Tax Ordinance (SHTO), was passed on third reading by the city council last week and is scheduled for signing today by Mayor Herbert Bautista amid a lot of hoopla at the City Hall in Diliman, Quezon City.

Essentially, this ordinance empowers the city government to impose and collect an additional 0.5-percent tax on all owners of pieces of property exceeding P100,000 in value. This impost would be on top of the regular real-property tax.

Lagman Jr. explained in a radio interview over dwIZ’s Business is our Business noontime program that the amounts to be collected would fund a socialized-housing project for the urban poor of Quezon City. When asked why the city council chose legitimate QC residents to shoulder the cost of the socialized-housing project, he gave the following explanation:

First, he said, the city government would, in effect, be “merely borrowing the money from them, because after five years, the additional tax would be lifted and the property owners would get their money back through rebates on their succeeding real-estate tax payments.”

This explanation apparently hasn’t mollified the critics of the penalize-the-good, reward-the-bad scheme.

Various homeowners associations have come out in force to block the implementation of the controversial ordinance.

The Alliance of Quezon City Homeowners Associations Inc., headed by Jordan Tolentino as president, said his group was planning on blocking the city measure through petitions and all sorts of initiatives that would fully express their rejection of the scheme. “Even if it’s signed into law, we would work against its enforcement,” he said.

What QC residents fear the most is the SHTO scheme, which actually rewards people who have violated property laws, would only serve to attract more and more so-called informal settlers of the organized kind to put up their lean-tos and shacks everywhere they please throughout the city. The knowledge that Quezon City’s politicians (who are doubtlessly lured by the voting potential of these urban denizens) have a penchant for coddling and doting on them would serve as a powerful incentive for them to move in far greater numbers than before.

“If we, the legitimate residents of QC, allow this to pass, we are afraid it won’t be long before our beloved city becomes known as the Squatters’ Capital of the Philippines!”

But Mayor Bautista has promised that this would not be the case at all because city authorities are ready to punish barangay officials who would allow any increase in informal settlements in their respective areas.

“We will prosecute local officials who fail to curtail any further increases in informal settlements,” he vowed. The Department of the Interior and Local Government, through a memo-circular, has authorized city authorities to suspend erring barangay officials.

Right now, however, QC authorities cannot even completely rid the banks of the city’s waterways of the thick slum colonies that seem to spring up in those dirty places

For the moment, their cure for this seemingly unstoppable urban blight is the SHTO. I wouldn’t put it past the irate homeowners of QC to add the capital letter “I” in the middle of the acronym, if only to express what they really think of the Bautista-Lagman scheme.

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