The unsettling

Mang Lando drives a tricycle in the Manila area. He used to live in the slums and was earning a living driving his three-wheeler. When his family was relocated and resettled in a designated site in General Trias, Cavite, he could not find a decent job. So he decided to pursue his old occupation driving a tricycle that transports people for short distances and along eskinitas (alleys). The population in the area guarantees his income.

In the meantime, there are now stricter rules along the estero (inlet canal) that prevent him from going back to his old residential mode of squatting. Any place for rent in the Manila area is too expensive for him to afford. So he becomes creative and just sleeps in his tricycle in uncomfortable positions that he has gotten used to. He saves this way, and he is able to provide for his family and he considers himself lucky to have a means of living.

Indeed, luck is relative. Parallel to the streets he treks is a family of four. Atop a blanket spread on the ground, beside a tree along an estero that reeks of stench, are two kids—one is eight, the other, four years of age—sleeping. Plus a baby girl nearly two years old who’s up and about. She watches her mom Karen prepare a type of pastry in a makeshift stove. They have no shelter above their heads, and no walls to at least hide their exposure. They have a bit of source of joy: inside a big carton box beside the children’s bedside (the blanket on the ground) are three puppies. She decides to keep them because her children adore puppies.

The sweltering summer heat is a challenge to us, but to Karen, it is bliss. It assures that they, and the puppies, will be dry and will not scamper to wherever place to remain dry when it rains. She believes they are safe along the river, so long as it does not overflow when there is a strong and incessant rain brought by a storm.

And as luck is relative, compared to Lando who sleeps in his trike or to Karen’s family who sleeps roofless and without walls, “squatters” with houses never had it so good. It is never difficult to understand. People below the poverty line would need to spend the meager resources they have on food and spend as little as possible on shelter. They do not have a choice really but to choose survival.

“Informal settlers,” or the humanized way of calling “squatters,” wherever they are—the lingo does little to hide the state of shelter and human conditions they are in.

Still, I consider Republic Act 7279, otherwise called the Lina Law, passed in the early 1990s to be one of the impactful legislations in the last three decades. Squatting used to be a crime in the 1970s. Squatters were considered nuisance. Our hearts say they are human beings with a right to shelter. Our brains say they shouldn’t be claiming land that they do not own. In the 1970s, the National Housing Authority was given the power to evict and demolish shanties and makeshift dwellings, even of an entire barangay sitting on government property, without need of court order or due process.

According to the Supreme Court then, squatters are a public nuisance that can be abated even without judicial proceedings. People who complain they are being ejected should first show that they have some title or legal claim over the property.

That law was repealed and squatting was decriminalized. More importantly, the Lina Law gave life to rhetoric and mandated that informal settlers cannot be removed without providing them an alternative relocation site and dwelling. Thus, the national and local governments cooperate to provide socialized housing to informal settlers. This means some of them who can pay some amortization for the house and lot that will be in their name (which can be under a lease-to-own scheme) and those who have no means for the meantime will be in a special program of “usufruct” (use without lease). There are also private enterprises with big hearts that participate in providing socialized housing for the marginalized.

More than two decades after the Lina Law, recent estimates report that one out of every four families in Metro Manila still live in the slums. Some are first timers; others, returnees. Some of these returnees even sold their rights (legally or not) to the resettlement dwelling they received so that they can go back to being informal settlers sans the convenience of a decent dwelling because of lack of employment in the resettlement vicinity.

It is no secret that when natural disaster strikes, the first and worst hit are the informal settlers. Their housing structures can easily be blown away by a strong wind, and many of them are still situated in high risk areas. Case in point is Tacloban where damage to informal settlers is absolute and where many of them have lost their lives. Why do they continue to risk it? They may die tomorrow when a natural disaster strikes, but they may die today if they do not find the means to eat.

The problem is obvious but a tough one to solve. For example, the Lina Law even requires providing employment opportunities to the resettled. It takes more than law. To be fair, NGOs, foundations and international organizations have been involved to alleviate the issue of lack of economic opportunities. I subscribe to the idea of establishing cooperatives and providing seed capital to communities to empower them through entrepreneurship. Helping them this way is the only real solution, even as it is the most difficult one to provide.

Campaign promises of “roof over the head of every Filipino” are still welcome and this rhetoric should now be converted into action with utmost urgency with a view to disasters that take lives. But roof over heads does not cut it, without the livelihood that puts food in their bellies.