The House of Representatives is open to a proposal for in-city mass housing projects for informal settler families (ISFs) and relocate the capital and seat of government to decongest Metro Manila.
Negros Occidental Rep. Alfredo Benitez, the House committee on housing and urban development chairman, said his panel has created a technical working group to review the proposal to create an Administrative Capital City Planning Commission tasked to conduct a feasibility study on the mass housing proposal.
Benitez, author of the proposal contained in House Bill 83, said based on the data released by the Philippine Statistics Authority, Metro Manila is home to 11.9 million people in 2010, making it one of the world’s most densely populated areas.
“Overpopulation, traffic congestion and high vulnerability to natural disasters have made Metro Manila or the National Capital Region (NCR) a pariah among world cities. There is a need to rethink and develop a masterplan that will decongest Metro Manila,” Benitez said.
At a congressional hearing, Benitez showed an audio-visual presentation which summed up the results of the National Housing Summit piloted two years ago and which culminated last year. Among the consensus reached was the construction of medium-rise buildings which would accommodate the ISFs sprawled over Metro Manila and eating up valuable urban space.
Out of the 1.5 million ISFs in the country, Benitez said nearly 600,000 are found in the NCR. The off-city government programs for the ISFs failed because many of the those who had been relocated have returned to the NCR as their relocation sites are far from their source of income, he added.
“If it can be done in the local level, then the implementation on a larger scale, on a national level, is really feasible,” Benitez said.
Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) Assistant Secretary Avelino Tolentino III earlier rallied behind the the mass-housing proposal and suggested that to make the housing project more affordable, government lands should be converted into housing sites.
Avelino said this could be cheaper in the long run for the government which will still own the lands. Relocation, meanwhile, entails spending money to relocate to far-flung areas the ISFs, who, however, end up returning to the NCR due to the unavailability of basic services in the new housing sites, Avelino added.
By allowing the free use of government lands, Avelino said, tenants will only pay a small amount for the investment the government will spend in constructing the housing building and for its maintenance.
Gabriela party-list Rep. Arlene Brosas, a member of the left-leaning Makabayan Bloc, agreed with the proposal and reiterated the need to ensure not only the affordability of the housing project but more importantly the tenants’ access to basic services.
Brosas also proposed to make the Tondo housing project an example and learn from its failures.
Meanwhile, Benitez said under HB 83, the proposed transfer of the capital and seat of government is also an attempt to decongest Metro Manila.
Benitez cited several countries where relocated seats of government have flourished such as in Korea, Malaysia and Brazil. Another example is Quezon City where a lot of government centers were moved because of the need to decongest Manila then.
“If we have done it before because we wanted to decongest Manila, then the same reasoning applies, that we could move our administrative offices out of Metro Manila,” Benitez said.