Homeless amid idle houses

There are at least 3 million people in the country who are homeless. The government, the National Housing Authority (NHA) in particular, has a backlog of 5.5 million houses.

Strangely, the NHA, which is mandated to build low-cost social housing to address homelessness, has admitted there are 55,000 houses that have been unoccupied for many years as the chosen beneficiaries of the houses don’t like them or are mired in the bureaucratic process of obtaining ownership of such property.

The Commission on Audit has an even higher count of more than 100,000 vacant NHA housing units that are rotting or already dilapidated due to long exposure to the elements. This means billions of pesos spent on building houses that went to waste because they are not serving their purpose.

This crazy reality drives the logic of the urban poor group Kadamay to occupy vacant government houses. After all, they are the beneficiaries-in-waiting being applicants for public housing themselves and their takeover of the idle houses leads to their maintenance and fulfillment of the government social responsibility of addressing homelessness while preventing squatting.

While the tens of thousands of unoccupied housing and homeless people occupying them seem to show a confusing state of housing in the country (there are houses but there are homeless), the situation points to bureaucratic red tape as the real provocation for the occupation of vacant housing.

For housing applicants, they are subjected to unreasonably lengthy screening or vetting, costly and time-consuming documentary requirements, and red tape.

For example, in applying for a Pag-IBIG housing or multipurpose loan, the agency requires submission of photocopies of contribution remittance record and official receipt of remittance payment to banks, when the Pag-IBIG clerk can see on their computer screen the data needed to verify the identity of the applicant as well as the contribution history.

Consolidating a Pag-IBIG member’s contributions from different employers through the years requires submission of similar papers and processing takes months when the records, again, can be seen on the computer screen. Pag-IBIG clerks keep on citing system upgrading as reason for long consolidation processing.

If the government can implement ease of doing business, other bureaucratic processing systems can be simplified so that public service is expedited and relief provided quickly.

Isn’t it shameful when public servants tasked to provide homes for the homeless go home at the end of the day while their clients are left to sleep in unsanitary evacuation centers or on the streets?

There is no reason the NHA cannot do things swiftly. If it keeps working in its old slow ways, then NHA, no housing authority, is an apt name for them.

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