Empty houses

THE NARRATIVE of informal settlers unfolds daily before our eyes. Most of them converge on the metropolis on the promise ever offered by greener pastures, put up temporary shelters of cardboard, tarpaulin, scrap wood and galvanized iron sheets that eventually become permanent, and proceed to set down roots. In time what were once vacant spaces in both residential and commercial blocks become peopled by them; slum communities are formed in areas completely unequipped for the necessities of living. Densely packed, the hovels’ cheek-by-jowl closeness and the sheer absence of sanitation facilities give rise to, and nurture, a collective defiance among the residents. The crude shelters become home, where they raise their (many) children and from where they sally forth to earn a living.

On occasions when their lives are disrupted, such as by fire or by demolition, the odds and ends of their existence are laid bare to “fortune and men’s eyes” in a scene truly Shakespearean, flung helter-skelter amid anguished cries and wild-eyed moves to get one step ahead of the inferno, or the government’s wrecking crew. (To be sure, a fire scene in a slum area will, courtesy of a TV camera’s intrusive eye, also expose stuff common in middle-class households, including refrigerators and the occasional plasma television, suggesting what are called “professional squatters.” But that’s another story.) At least a couple of demolition occasions—on North Avenue in Quezon City and in the Guadalupe area in Makati—stick in the mind’s eye: running battles between the residents and the local government units assisted by law enforcers, marked by stones, molotov cocktails, and other projectiles, water cannons and tear gas, blocked traffic, and a shocking break in civil behavior.

The Metro Manila Development Authority estimates that in the metropolis alone, more than 500,000 families live in slum areas, and more than 200,000 and around 175,000 occupy government lands and private lands, respectively, according to an Inquirer special report by Charles Buban published on Oct. 6 and 13. Subdivision and Housing Developers Association chair Manuel Crisostomo noted the value of these families: “We should recognize and help [them] because the majority of them work in Metro Manila, ensuring that the needs of the higher-income families are met. They work in factories, construction sites and even in dumpsites, do a variety of home-based enterprises, or work as domestic servants, security guards or street vendors.” He pointed out that helping these families acquire decent housing would assist the government in moving a step closer to reducing the housing backlog, which is pegged at 3.9 million.

But consider the dismaying development at Barangay Santiago in General Trias, Cavite, where, in another Inquirer special report that was run on Oct. 29, Maricar Cinco wrote of 180 studio-type houses that stand empty and are going to seed. (A photograph of a row of the houses shows doors on which the paint had faded and missing jalousie slats on a window, as well as—an eloquent touch—a cow and its calf lolling languidly by a door.) The housing project was intended for 2,100 informal settlers who would be displaced by the construction of the planned 11.7-kilometer extension of the Light Rail Transit Authority from Baclaran in Pasay City to Bacoor in Cavite. As early as 2008, the previous administration of Cavite embarked on the project with the LRTA and proceeded to build the housing units; 180 were completed although, as recently announced by President Aquino himself, the construction of the planned LRT extension will begin only in January 2014. Meanwhile, the housing project is embroiled in a financial mess, with each 22-square-meter unit found to have ultimately cost P2.8 million each! The scheme is not unfamiliar and has seen various shapes or forms in this country of year-round ghosts: The reported cost estimate of real estate developers who inspected the units was P240,000 each.

Details such as unoccupied housing units perilously close to ruin (no matter that, as in other relocation areas, they still lack electricity and water connections) acquire a hard-edged irony given the families that have fashioned dwelling places on the banks of waterways, under and in the interstices of bridges, and other unlikely nooks and crannies. These details show how slowly we have traveled on the road to progress where, as Manuel Crisostomo wistfully dreams it, “slums of despair” become “slums of hope.”