THE creation of a new Department of Housing and Urban Development will be a disaster bound to set back in a big way the performance of badly needed shelter programs, Buhay Rep. Lito Atienza warned on Sunday.
“The proposed DHUD is absolutely redundant. It will not serve any real purpose. On the contrary, it will only install another bureaucratic wall that is guaranteed to further hold up housing projects,” said Atienza, a one-time general manager of the National Housing Authority.
“We will have several new DHUD undersecretaries and assistant secretaries meddling in every program or project, and creating bottlenecks,” he added.
The national government should instead be decentralizing housing programs with the help of provincial, city and municipal governments, he said.
Atienza mentioned the “terrible example” of the highly centralized, delayed and substandard construction of 205,128 homes in Eastern Visayas for the families displaced by Super Typhoon “Yolanda.”
“There’s no question the outcome would have been positive had the government simply given the families lots in thenew settlements, complete with all the building materials they needed to construct their new homes on their own, plus some social welfare cash assistance,” Atienza said.