MMDA spruces Vitas tenements to house informal settlers

Metropolitan Manila Development Authority(MMDA) has started rehabilitation of the medium-rise tenement buildings in Vitas, Tondo, to decongest Metro Manila of informal settlers.

The Metro Manila Inter-Agency Committee on Informal Settlers (MMIAC) has counted some 544,000 squatter families that have to be relocated, 70,000 of which are living in high-risk places such as creek and riversides.

But according to MMIAC’s projections, the government has to build 305 houses a day, or 30,859 units per year over the current production of 30,141 units, to house 544,000 informal settlers in a ten-year-period.

As idle lands in Metro Manila and nearby provinces have become scarcer, MMDA Chairman Bayani Fernando, who also chairs MMIAC, said a tenement-type apartment building is the most practical means of providing resettlement to the city’s homeless families.

“To build 305 houses a day is already a big problem, more so where to build them,” Fernando said.

He said MMDA has started cleaning up and renovating the 27 tenement buildings in Vitas, Tondo, so that the complex could serve as a model community for future relocation sites.

“We want to show to everybody that high-density living such as these tenements is still a viable concept,” Fernando said during a recent forum at the Forestry Development Center of the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, Laguna, on land use development and management of informal settlers.

He said tenement buildings such as those in Vitas, unlike in conventional village-type relocation sites, do not require much space, yet these can house more people compared to single-detached houses.

Citing his experiences in Marikina City where he had been a three-term mayor, Fernando said there is no need to give people big lots where they can build their own houses.

“In Marikina, the standard lot size is 24 square meters, which is already too big since the owners would build three or four-storey apartments. It’s no use giving them lots because they’ll fill it up anyway,” the MMDA chief said.  –Manila Times