The US-Estrada regime's housing program:
Deception and violence against Metro Manila's poor

Basahin ang artikulong ito sa Pilipino

Invoking "development", the reactionary regime is relentlessly destroying poor communities in Metro Manila to benefit conspiring bureaucrats and foreign monopoly capitalists and local big businesses in real estate, construction, basic services and utilities.

In the process, the reactionary government profits from the poor through its deceptive housing, land distribution and relocation programs in connivance with petty bourgeois racketeering groups. It aims to destroy not only the homes and livelihood of the poor in the interest of big businesses and bureaucrats, but also actual and potential mass bases of the revolutionary movement.

The reactionary government conspires with the World Bank and private developers affiliated with the Chamber of Real Estate and Builder's Association (CREBA) in this scheme. According to the World Bank's bankrupt concept, the widespread homelessness of workers and semi-workers is simply the result of lack of funding; and that projects geared towards solving this should be based on the market (meaning, on the availability of buyers) and not on the people's right to, and need for, decent housing.

The World Bank is set to grant the government a $120 million (P4.8 billion)- loan while the Estrada regime prepares a counterpart sum from public funds earmarked for the pension of government employees. As proof of the insidiousness of such programs, "beneficiaries" are to pay by installment. In the past, home mortgage interest rates were at 9% per annum. They are set to reach up to 15% under the current program.

In such a setup, favored CREBA developers are able to exploit government credit while making sure that they rake in millions in profits from the poor tenants living in rows of cramped and substandard housing units built on unsafe sites. The lowest monthly installment rate is P500 for a unit no bigger than 18 square meters; while a slightly larger unit costs P5,000 monthly.

The largest developers like the Ayala and Aboitiz families are at the forefront of CREBA. Meanwhile, officials of the reactionary government are scrambling to grab a big chunk of the P200 billion-fund allocated to low-cost housing. Speaker Manuel Villar owns (through dummies) C&P Homes, the largest real estate company dealing in low- and medium-cost housing.

Real estate businesses of Estrada's wives, children and relatives emerged as he began his term as president. Among them, Guia Gomez and Jose Victor "JV" Ejercito, Estrada's favorite wife and son, have set up the most number of real estate companies in 1998 and 1999. Capitalization of their companies grew at a scandalous rate. An example is JV Ejercito's construction company Buildworth. Valued at P14 million in 1997, it was worth P83.3 million by 1998.

Reactionary officials are also scurrying for positions that would enable them to control such funds. The Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council tasked to manage all housing projects became the center of an intense power struggle within Estrada's cabinet in late 1999. Lenny de Jesus, a Danding Cojuangco minion, won control over it.

Demolishing poor communities is part of the Estrada regime's housing program. Since the beginning of Estrada's term, over 50,000 poor families have already been violently evicted from their homes in Metro Manila. An estimated 500,000 families more will be forced out of their homes in the coming years.

To thwart resistance from residents and freely carry out demolitions, the reactionary government concocts various schemes to split the ranks of the urban poor and further trample upon their rights. Among these schemes are the criminalization of the urban poor as "professional squatters", the seizure of previously distributed land and now, the proposed moratorium on the issuance by courts of temporary restraining orders against any government "development" project.

In communities where the urban poor have attained a certain level of self-organization, reactionaries dish out offers of low-cost housing, relocation to adjacent provinces and money to bribe a few and split the ranks of the poor. The tiny grouplets of revisionist renegades, as well as the anti-communist social democrats serve as partners of the reactionary government in sowing discord, splitting and breaking their struggle. In the past years, the now fragmented and moribund group of Popoy Lagman led the rest in making money out of the struggles of the urban poor. Frank Pascual's KPD has also been doing some scene-stealing and is appropriating its share of the loot in some poor communities in Metro Manila.

The lack of decent housing in urban centers is one of the most severe problems facing workers and semi-workers. It arises, on one hand, from very low wages, the mass dismissal of workers and the displacement of peasants in the countryside even as there are no jobs in the cities to absorb them. On the other hand, it is also due to the all-out destruction of working class communities to give way to large enterprises and government infrastructure. Not a few are being driven to the streets, pushed to the cities' peripheries and owing to the high cost of decent housing, are forced to rent houses that look like pigpens.

As it was under previous regimes, nothing can be expected from the Estrada government's grand housing showcase so long as the exploitation and oppression of the working class remains and worsens. Only the reactionary classes stand to benefit from this program. Low rentals or even free housing will not completely solve the housing problem as long as the social system that created it exists. Only through the struggle of workers and semi-workers, in solidarity with the peasant masses and within the framework of the national democratic revolution, can the real solution to the housing problem be achieved.

July 2000
English Edition

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