Obscure gov’t program turns squatters to landowners
By Jocelyn Uy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:08:00 08/17/2008
JOSEPH SITT IN TAGUIG CITY IS LIKE any other simple community -- with a difference.
Barely 20 years ago, it was a hilly range covered by tall grass, strewn with garbage and dotted by shanties built helter-skelter by families that had no permanent place to call home.
Now the former squatter colony is driven by determination and dreams.
Approaching noon on the day the Inquirer visited, Corazon Bernal sat in the tiny multipurpose hall with her calculator and sheets, keeping tabs on her neighbors’ land dues.
Schoolchildren in bright blue uniforms played ball on a paved street lined with gated houses inside which womenfolk busied themselves preparing lunch.
Elsewhere, armed with two-way radios, “road leaders”—the community’s version of barangay watchmen—pounded the beat.
In the market a few blocks from where Bernal worked, a blaring videoke machine livened up the rather lethargic day.
Community ownership
Thanks to the government’s little known Community Mortgage Program (CMP), which is marking its 20th anniversary tomorrow, the more than 200 residents of Joseph Sitt have been able to acquire the 2.6-hectare land and to transform it into a neighborhood complete with paved roads, electricity, phone lines and running water.
Implemented in 1988 by the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) through the Social Housing Finance Corp., the CMP provides mortgage financing to slum communities to assure poor families of land tenure.
The program allows families to acquire a privately owned property through community ownership, where the cost of the land is divided among the members, thus making payment easy on the pocket.
Building brick by brick
“The CMP is about the poor who can’t afford regular housing,” said former HUDCC chair Teodoro Katigbak, who launched the program two decades ago with then President Corazon Aquino.
“The most important thing is to give them land ownership. As long as they [own the land], they can gradually build their home brick by brick until they come up with a whole house,” he told the Inquirer.
Katigbak is now acting chair of the Foundation for the Development of the Urban Poor, a nonprofit organization helping informal communities across the country access a CMP loan.
The foundation is mainly responsible for securing pertinent government approvals and licenses, mediating in negotiations with landowners, mapping out land areas and determining the capability of communities to pay loans through socioeconomic surveys.
After two decades, the foundation has helped more than 5,500 families secure land tenure. On the other hand, the CMP has provided land to roughly 200,000 families in depressed areas nationwide, granting them a total of P6.4 billion in loans.
Joseph Sitt was the first squatter settlement to be granted a community loan worth P8 million under the CMP. (The community was named after the American owner of a factory since closed located on a street that bore his name.)
The money allowed 263 households to purchase the property from the owners—National Life Insurance Corp. and United Philippines Realty Corp.—after a year of negotiation and loan processing.
‘Very big thing’
Each beneficiary with a piece of land ranging from 19 to 159 square meters was required to pay a monthly amortization worth P150 up to a little over P400 for 25 years.
“Being able to own this property is a very big thing for us because we are no longer afraid of being shooed away or our houses being demolished,” said Bernal, secretary of the Joseph Sitt Homeowners Association Inc. (Joshai).
Her job requires her to keep a detailed list of the residents’ dues and to ensure that each meets the monthly payment to the government.
Then and now
Bernal recalled that before the residents purchased the property early in 1989, they walked grassy paths and lit their dark nights with oil lamps.
They also had to bear with a syndicate that made them pay P600 as “reservation” fee.
Things changed after the land purchase, said Joshai president Rodillo Magsipoc, 65.
With help from the local government, the streets were spruced up, phone connections were made accessible, and water and power lines were installed, Magsipoc said.
Also, each household started to invest in its home, gradually replacing parts of the makeshift shelter with concrete fixtures.
The Bernals, for example, started out with a shanty sitting on a 100-sq.m. lot, which cost them P187 in monthly amortization.
After almost 20 years, the shanty has evolved into a two-story concrete structure financed mostly by the income that Bernal earned as a domestic helper in Hong Kong.
The payments were completed last December and the family has been awarded the land title, Bernal said with pride.
Pioneering idea
The CMP is an offshoot of the “Pagtambayayong Foundation” pioneered in Cebu 25 years ago by Francisco “Bimbo” Fernandez, the chief of the Aquino administration’s Presidential Commission of the Urban Poor.
The idea of organizing communities to purchase private land occurred to Fernandez while he was looking for a house to buy in 1980. He was newly married then, he recalled.
Fernandez found a 4,200-sq.m. property being sold at P10 per sq.m., which he deemed too big for him and his wife.
“But I realized that most of my friends didn’t have land of their own, so I asked around if they wanted to own a piece of the property,” he said.
He was able to gather around 40 friends to share the cost of the property worth P45,000.
Later, philanthropists backed him in his efforts to assist other landless folks purchase private land.
Learning about the success of Fernandez’s movement, the government adopted the scheme, thus launching the CMP.
Tweaking needed
“We often criticize squatters for [buying] a television set, a ref, a stove and other appliances even if they are poor. [But] it’s because they are landless and they can bring these with them whenever they are evicted,” Katigbak said.
“But if you give them land ownership, they will spend their money on hollow blocks, the toilet bowl, the kitchen sink...” he said.
But the CMP still needs a little tweaking, Katigbak pointed out. He said more poor families would be given land tenure if the government fast-tracked the loan process.
“It still takes two years from loan application to payment of land being purchased,” Katigbak said. “Consequently, there is an ever-growing backlog of pending applications—and thwarted dreams.”
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