TAGUIG CITY, Philippines?Two million people living around a huge lake east of the Philippine capital could spend Christmas with their homes partly submerged, after slapdash development left floodwaters nowhere to go.

The mish-mash of farms, shantytowns, housing developments, factories, and tourist resorts around Laguna De Bay remain swamped with muddy water following the September 26 floods which killed nearly 300 people in and around Manila.

The area around the lake has six million residents?about half metropolitan Manila's population?and 2.2 million of them live in districts that could stay flooded for three months, according to Edgardo Manda, head of the government's Laguna Lake Development Authority.

Lacking a modern sewerage system, much of the sprawling city's runoff, trash, and liquid pollution goes into the lake. Manda advised people in the flooded areas to relocate, warning some may be forced to move if they don't go voluntarily.

However, Lorenzo Cruz and his family?who are among the last rice farmers in the narrow band of marshes in Taguig city between the lake's western shore and metro Manila?have little choice but to stay.

Cruz, 42, his wife, and one of their children are living in a half-submerged home made of corrugated iron roof sheets and plywood walls to protect their pigs and ward off burglars.

They are sleeping in beds on makeshift platforms that barely keep them above the water, while wooden palettes in the pigpen keep their five hogs from drowning.

"When we're asleep rats crawl all over us," he said. "The pigs are better off."

Cruz, like many in the area's older communities who rely on fishing and farming, is angry about the new housing, roads, and other development that critics say have worsened the flooding.

"Ever since they built them, the floods have gotten worse because the catchment areas were lost," he said, gesturing at a row of peach-colored apartment units and a bridge across the mouth of the Napindan river.

The Cruz family now paddle around home and above their rice fields on an improvised styrofoam raft.

Throughout the water-logged region, there are other remarkable signs of a new way of life as people try to adapt to lives on water.

Some boats are parked in what used to be driveways.

In submerged houses, most of the furniture and appliances that can be moved have been hauled to the second floor, while chickens, including expensive fighting cocks, roost on rooftops.

Residents of houses with no upper floors have nailed wooden palettes against the wall to keep their beds off the water.

Some women wash clothes by hand in submerged living rooms, balancing on tall chairs and benches, while naked children cavort on the streets, which they use as impromptu swimming pools.

But as the crisis drags on, garbage is piling up in giant plastic containers on street corners.

There is no electricity and, with toilets blocked for over a week, residents giggle or blush when asked how they relieve themselves.

Trucks deliver tap water to the outskirts of the area, which residents put into plastic jugs that they bring home using boats and other flotation devices. Authorities now admit that chaotic urban planning, or no planning at all, has aggravated the Laguna flood debacle.

"Our problem is we live where we should never have lived," said Bayani Fernando, head of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, which is in charge of flood control, sanitation, and traffic.

Migrants as well as businesses have encroached riverbanks, impeding natural drainage, he said.

But Gerry Balinas, a 40-year-old used car parts dealer whose shanty home was flooded, said informal settlers near Laguna had nowhere else to go.

Balinas said he uprooted his family of five from the rebellion-torn southern island of Mindanao 11 years ago.

"We had no jobs and no future there," he added.

"Now, if they want this area cleared, we are willing to leave as long as they give us new houses elsewhere."