|
IF NOT THE RIVERBANK, WHERE? ONDOY’S MESSAGE Mary Racelis Institute on Church and Social Issues Well before the Ondoy floods receded, informal dwellers were returning to their riverbank and lakeside settlements. Why? - because these locations are near their workplaces and together with community support systems offer them better control over their own post-calamity actions. Their limited choices stem largely from the failure of government and the society at large to recognize their right to a legitimate, affordable place in the city where their families can pursue life-enhancing strategies. Government’s distant resettlement programs emphasizing shelter accommodations must be re-evaluated in light of people’s preferences to remain in the city with secure tenure, proximity to their livelihoods, and onsite incremental housing schemes,. The staggering lack of fit between government policies and people’s realities indicates that it is time to initiate urban land reform by reconceptualizing urban land rights, land use, land values and land policies. Done right, the overhaul of obsolete institutions, laws and policies will create and sustain cities that are just, humane, competitive and inclusive of all Filipinos. - 0 - Everyone from the President on down is proclaiming that riverbank settlers must not be allowed to return and rebuild their shelters. Yet, the settlers are in fact 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? Typhoon affected victims return to their riverbank sites because they consider them the safest alternative for maintaining control over their lives in disaster situations. 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 officials in their crisp bright-blue uniforms set off by yellow-orange piping – a dramatic contrast to the faded and damp clothing of the flood victims – was striding through what was left of the settlement. Two of the officials had posted themselves prominently on an enormous rock that commanded a panoramic view of the settlement. Eying 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 whose source one didn’t even want to contemplate. 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? The government allows large stretches of vacant urban land to go unutilized while thousands of urban poor workers are forced to become informal settlers for lack of legitimate, affordable spaces in the city. Aling Edna (pseudonym) told us how she and her neighbors in an attempt to move farther away from the river, 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 tore them down. This is private property, scolded the demolition crew. Lamented Aling Edna, “Why does our government allow a single family to hold so much unused land nearby for years, while thousands of us here are struggling to find a place where we can simply rest and begin restoring our lives!” Riverbank dwellers recognize the imminent danger from floods but have evolved ways of dealing with them which they consider less threatening than being sent to distant out-of-city resettlement sites. Urban poor leaders had elaborated at an earlier meeting: “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, the family is reunited on our riverbank. We assess the damage and start cleaning up, line up for relief goods, reconstruct our houses, and go back to our hanapbuhay (livelihoods) as soon as we can. Ondoy took us by surprise though, like everyone else. The waters rose so quickly!” “Why are we blamed for the floods? What about the subdivisions and shopping centers built along the river with government permits? If we had somewhere better to go near here that we felt was better, of course many of us would be willing to move. But our hanapbuhay is here! Do they think we like living in this smelly, dirty place, going far to fetcg potable water, and using the river as a toilet? We just tolerate at that as we have to live near our jobs. Also, the school and market are nearby, and we know where the clinics and hospitals are. Besides, our relatives, neighbors and friends are here. We help each other especially in times of crisis.” “Danger zone? Compared to what? 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 (livelihood). Where once we could make a living somehow in the city, being thrown 40 kms away from the city means we become dependent on government offices that don’t deliver yet make us lose control over our lives. Those resettlement sites are the real danger zones! We can’t survive there. That’s why we come back to our old settlements. And to think they still want us to amortize houses that most of us cannot afford and never wanted in the first place!” Priorities of urban informal settlers favor security of tenure in the city so that they can find work, feed their families and send their children to school. The collective trauma wreaked by Typhoon Ondoy should at last force us to confront the questions that millions of 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 upright 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!” Studies have shown that urban poor people face daily emergencies around food, employment, secure tenure and basic services. Living near their sources of income is crucial to their survival strategies. Onsite security of tenure thus commands a far higher priority for them than shelter units. 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, family displacement and additional threats to their already precarious existence. In-city settlement upgrading and onsite housing work best for the urban poor, who organize themselves to pay in installments and/or contribute sweat equity . NGOs and People’s Organizations, supported by 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 Commonweatlh, 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. Urban land reform is necessary to reallocate land in the city in equitable, inclusive ways. 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 reminds us it is time to take stock and get serious about urban land reform. There is vacant land in many of Metro Manila’s constituent cities, but it is not available for housing the city’s low-income workforce. Contributing to this skewed situation are low taxation rates on idle-land, 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 allowing higher taxes as well as corruption, while the needs of millions of the urban workforce go unmet. NGOs and POs can help by articulating and formulating options poor people can take as responsible citizens of the society, and work out a range of actual possibilities with government and private sector groups. Poor households are not uniform, after all, and community mixtures demand different kinds of solutions. That means listening to and discussing real options with the one-third of the metropolitan citizenry whose poverty and lack of access to legal, affordable in-city housing forces them to cling to their employment-friendly but “illegal” settlements. Church officials need to champion urban land reform and equity for the urban poor in much the same way they did for farmers in the CARPER debate. And the society as a whole, especially its more privileged sectors, needs to build on the compassionate and caring elements of our Christian-Muslim heritage, so evident in the recent massive outpouring of aid and personal sacrifice to help flood victims. This means that after relief, rehabilitation and development efforts must give our urban poor workforce an equitable stake in the city. Before relegating thousands of riverbank dwellers to danger zones in Bulacan, Cavite and Laguna resettlement areas that divest them of their livelihoods and capacity to plan, officials need to reconceptualize the consequences of urbanization, urban poverty, urban land allocation, and the quality of life of all. They need to listen to and discuss real options with the masses of poor people especially victimized by the recent flood. Although economically better-off inundated families also need attention, their asset base and more affluent networks enable them to restart their lives more effectively than can poor families whose already meager assets have been decimated. Immediate steps can be taken to respond to short-, medium- and long-term needs. With flood waters now receding and rehabilitation efforts underway, local and national government authorities can take these steps in consultation with civil society and the private sector: 1. Enable every affected urban poor community to assess and report on the economic and social-psychological damage they have experienced as a result of Ondoy. 2. Encourage river settler communities to identify tracts of vacant land in their vicinity which might suitably house a number of riverbank families at least temporarily; list their owners if they can get the information, and convey this to city officials; 3. Request city officials to identify and discuss with the landowners and the nearby settlers the possibility of a temporary, two- or three-year usufruct arrangement for temporary relocation of nearby river-settlers, in which the city government will pay a lumpsum rental advance to the owner, and which the community will repay in monthly rental installments to be collected by the community association/PO; this rental-usufruct variation is derived from successful, demand driven initiatives undertaken by the Community Mortgage Program (CMP), the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines, Inc (HPFPI), the Tri-Corps NGOs encompassing Community Organizers Multiversity (COM), Community Organization of the Philippine Enterprise (COPE), and Urban Poor Associates (UPA), and the Philippine Support Services Agencies, or PhilSSA, a network of urban NGOs. 4. Draw on academic professionals, development NGOs, and city planning offices to design in consultation with people’s organizations and barangay officials a series of simple investigative instruments to obtain the needed data, and engage in the analyzing and writing up the results quickly with the respective communities. Government, the private sector, and civil society including urban poor communities, need to re-examine obsolete concepts of land use, land values and land rights, and re-allocate societal resources more equitably so as to prioritize people’s wellbeing rather than predominantly profit motives. 5. Urge the city government in accordance with UDHA requirements to identify social housing sites in the city and allocate these to nearby settlers within a two- to three-year period after the usufruct arrangement; where space is limited the possibility of mixed-use medium-rise buildings, some suitably set-back along the river, as appropriate for some can be discussed with the community in a participatory planning process. The experience of NGOs engaged in land acquisition and community upgrading programs should be tapped for workable solutions. It is time to clear our societal channels of the debris formed by obsolete rules and outlooks, and regenerate ourselves into a fast-flowing mainstream force flowing toward social reform. The urban poor form the bulk of our Metro Manila workforce. As Filipino workers, aspiring family members, and citizens, they are entitled to live in an inclusive city, like everyone else. That is the message of Typhoon Ondoy. |
