Scavengers living in condemned tenements face eviction

(First of two parts)

Tessie Rada, a 63-year-old grandmother, has learned to navigate through labyrinthine Aroma Compound, a temporary housing project at Vitas, in Manila’s Tondo district, with near-gymnastic skill.

To get from the welcome arch on R-10 Road to her apartment in Building 2, she sidesteps heaps of garbage and puddles of mud, and squeezes into narrow alleys between decaying buildings and heaving flesh.

The air is thick with the stench of rotting food and sweat, but she’s not winded at all.

“You get used to it,” she said. “It’s not that we don’t aspire for better conditions. We just live with what we have.”

Rada and her family of five are among the 5,000 residents of Aroma Compound, which was built for the scavengers of Smokey Mountain.

They have been waiting to be moved to permanent shelters since 1995, when the government ordered the dump shuttered due to environmental pollution and risk to public health.

But 23 years later, the National Housing Authority (NHA) has condemned the site as unsafe, along with Punta Santa Ana Tenements, also in Manila, and Fort Bonifacio Tenement in Taguig City. All 7,000 occupants of the three tenements have been ordered to leave.

“They say they wish to relocate us to a site where it’s safer,” Rada said, gesturing toward the collapsed concrete wall of her apartment building, which overlooks a mountain of trash.

“Yes, we would be physically safe. But the options are far from our livelihoods, far from [the children’s] schools. They might as well have sentenced us to death,” she said.

Worst lot

Like most of the residents, Rada and her husband worked as scavengers to raise their three grandchildren, all in elementary school.

Except for Aroma—or Vitas, which was erected two decades later—the tenements were built in the 1960s as part of the NHA mandate to provide affordable housing for low-income families.

Vitas has 34 two-story buildings that were originally designed to accommodate 2,500 families.

The families were supposed to be transferred to permanent houses at Paradise Heights, an in-city relocation site in Tondo, Manila.

But when the NHA finally finished building the houses in 2004, not everyone was accommodated, said Elsie Trinidad, a spokesperson for the housing agency.

Evangeline Rontos, who was in her teens when her parents left her to move to Paradise Heights, sold her apartment there and settled in Caloocan City.

“It was beautiful then, clean and organized,” Rontos, 39, said of the Vitas of her youth.

With a husband who works as trash hauler and four children, she said the neighborhood was now foul and filthy. “We’re watching it crumble,” she said.

Maxed out

Some of those still staying in Vitas are original awardees with extended families. Others have moved out but are renting their apartments to outsiders.

The buildings swiftly decayed as the population doubled, and from years of overuse, Trinidad said.

In 2010, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) declared the buildings “structurally unsound, dangerous and high-risk.”

The walls and roofs have either collapsed or cracked, plastered over by the residents with whatever they could find—plywood, wire mesh, tarpaulin—to keep what remains of the structures from falling apart.

LIVING DANGEROUSLY Scavengers and their extended families occupy Punta Santa Ana Tenements in Manila,which the Department of Public Works and Highways has declared “structurally unsound, dangerous and high-risk.” —PHOTO BY RICHARD A. REYES

Midway to the housing project’s period of viability and liveability, usually around 50 years, it has maxed out what Trinidad called its “full economic life.”

The Office of the Building Official in Manila ordered the buildings’ demolition on Nov. 20, 2017, citing three findings from an inspection two years earlier.

Vitas did not have substantial drainage systems and sanitary facilities.

The common comfort rooms in each structure were clogged and could not accommodate the simultaneous needs of occupants.

Obnoxious odor prevailed and posed health hazards.

Citing these flaws, alongside the government’s campaign to prepare the city for a possible “Big One” earthquake, the NHA has renewed its appeals to occupants to vacate the buildings for their own safety.

“These housing sites are disasters waiting to happen,” Trinidad said. “The only option is preemptive evacuation before anything [bad] happens.”

Too late?

As early as 2012, the NHA had been offering the residents alternative government housing sites in Naic, Cavite province, Baras in Rizal province and Camarin in Caloocan. In March, the agency pressed its order to the residents to leave voluntarily or face eviction, taking the residents by surprise.

“They let the problem sit for years, and then suddenly they call for preemptive evacuation. [What] is really their interest here? They have no concrete plans for us,” said Fe Hullipaz, president of the Vitas residents’ group, Samahan ng mga Maralita sa Tenement Housing.

Trinidad said the NHA had seen through the residents’ calls for in-city relocation.

“We had to listen to them. [We] have given them since 2012, but the preferences of the people, they did not materialize,” she said.

The residents have found allies in several militant party-list lawmakers, particularly Gabriela Rep. Emmi de Jesus, who volunteered to help negotiate with local governments for in-city relocation.

But there was hardly available land and most local governments approached by De Jesus did not want to shoulder the burden of more informal settlers.

In the end, the original alternative sites on the outskirts of Metro Manila have remained the only viable option.

Retrofit, not demolish

The same concerns were shared by residents of Punta Santa Ana Tenements in Manila. The project’s towering, uniform structures belie the buildings’ deterioration.

Built along the Pasig River in 1963 under then President Diosdado Macapagal for informal settlers transferred from danger zones, the tenements were home to at least 1,000 people.

The two multistory buildings weren’t just structures but represented Barangays 901 and 902 of Manila.

Their fate was political capital for candidates during elections, though no official has really made overtures to the NHA, Trinidad said.

“In any case, the barangays exist only because of the tenements. The officials, the voters are also the residents. When it’s demolished, so too are the barangays,” she said.

“It’s really the homeowners who resist the order and negotiate with the NHA,” she added.

Eduardo Igoy, the president of the homeowners’ association, insisted the buildings were fine, arguing that the DPWH and the NHA did not even conduct a “scientific test” to determine its structural soundness before it released its 2010 order to vacate.

But Gracia Malimban, NHA field officer for Punta Santa Ana, said that Igoy was merely referring to a hammer test, which required the residents to vacate and the apartments padlocked before the test could be carried out.

“No one wanted to do that, of course,” Malimban said.

The DPWH still tested eight cores of the two buildings and discovered that the concrete within had been pulverized.

Rehabilitation

Still, residents for both Vitas and Punta Santa Ana remain hopeful that the NHA will retrofit, not demolish, the buildings.

Ricardo Cajigas, Manila city engineer, told the Inquirer that the housing projects, especially Vitas, were well past the point of rehabilitation.

“It would cost more to save the structures than to build new ones. Rehabilitating the structures would essentially be rebuilding the whole thing anyway,” Cajigas said.

The NHA has yet to determine what it plans to do with the properties after the buildings are demolished.

Trinidad said the agency was considering reclassifying the land for mix-use purposes and develop the sites through public-private partnerships, which would surely make any housing project in the area expensive.

“If we do build another housing site there, of course its former residents would be the priority,” said NHA’s Trinidad.

“But it’s going to be under a set of new terms and conditions. If before they paid P7 for rent way back in 1965, it’s going to be different now. After all, the thrust of the government is affordable, not free, housing,” she added.

For the people soon to be uprooted from their homes, they cannot even see the future for which they are being given priority. They view the proposal as just another one of the risks they have to choose from.

“We’ll continue in our fight for our right to live here,” Hullipaz said. “At least until we are given better options.”