A novel PPP effort

For sheer scale and intractability, the issue of informal settlers has left authorities more than stumped. Physically removing shanties and whole communities simply won’t do anymore, not when a staggering one-fourth of Metro Manila is now classified as informal settlements and the urban poor constitute about 20 percent of the Philippines’ total population. Forced evictions have only led to violent incidents between lawmen assigned to enforce demolition orders and the desperate residents intent on preventing their homes from being torn down.

In March last year, after meeting with urban poor groups, President Aquino sought a remedy through a “covenant” that promised a government allocation of P10 billion every year until 2016 to relocate informal settlers from so-called danger zones in Metro Manila. The relocation terms were meant to be an improvement over the old practice, where the urban poor were often resettled in communities far from their places of work, with badly built houses and substandard amenities. The baseline promise of Mr. Aquino’s covenant was relocation limited to “on-site, in-city or near-city areas,” to mitigate the impact of the daily commute on family breadwinners and their enforced separation from families while at work.

“We will not institutionalize such situations by building sites in the city where they will live apart from their families,” the President said then. “As the workforce in the cities, the poor, up to the extent possible, should be given the opportunity to stay in the cities.”

The resettlement plan covered some 100,000 families living near the metropolis’ estuaries, waterways, rivers and creeks. However, before his unfortunate death, Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo admitted that the government could build houses for at most 20,000 families a year, and that was “as long as we can find a site.” The new scheme “is not as easy as buying a car,” Robredo had said. On top of the difficulty of finding good relocation sites, the bidding process is lengthy and laborious, and rigorous consultation with the urban poor is needed before they would agree to be moved out.

Even that gradual five-year plan, sad to say, has been virtually nullified by the monsoon rains that recently inundated Manila. The government is now talking of the immediate dismantling of the hovels and structures that choke the city’s waterways to give way to urgent flood-protection systems—a task far easier said than done.

Policymakers and urban planners have long called for a long-term, comprehensive and innovative approach to this problem, and not mere palliatives. One such recent initiative deserves an earnest look: The Intramuros Administration and Gawad Kalinga have announced a program that would resettle the urban poor now squatting on private and public lands inside Intramuros. Over the next three years, some 3,400 families will be relocated outside of the historic, 64-hectare Walled City, first to a Gawad Kalinga village in Trece Martires, Cavite, on a piece of land donated by the Catholic Church. The community will be the first of three planned “Kalinga Intramuros” (KI) villages outside of Metro Manila.

The move aims to decongest Intramuros and allow, at last, its rehabilitation into the heritage and tourism jewel that it should have been but for the official neglect it has suffered through the decades. However, the joint Intramuros-GK project hopes to achieve this not by the usual ways of local governments—by casting the settlers out and leaving them twisting in the wind.

Notable are some thoughtful, carefully considered elements in the program: A shuttle service between Intramuros and the KI villages will bring workers to their daily jobs. Those who need to stay in the city on weekdays can bunk in a hostel that Gawad Kalinga is planning to build inside the Walled City. And a showroom selling products made by Gawad Kalinga beneficiaries to tourists and visitors will help augment the incomes of families and livelihood practitioners.

The KI villages will, in the beginning, be able to accommodate 100 families—a small number, but certainly a good enough start, and more importantly, one that offers a constructive and humane way out of the morass. If this program is successful, not only will it improve lives—and Intramuros, for that matter. It will also point the way for the kind of novel public-private partnership efforts that the government should encourage more of.