NHA to award 25,000 housing units to QC informal settlers

About 25,000 housing units in relocation sites of the National Housing Authority (NHA) will be awarded to informal settlers in Quezon City, particularly those occupying danger zones such as sidewalks, roadways, waterways and areas under bridges and transmission lines and over water pipelines.

The city’s Urban Poor Affairs Office head Ramon Asprer reported to Mayor Herbert Bautista during a regular executive staff meeting that the Department of Interior and Local Government is now in the process of validating the master list of the informal settlers to be relocated immediately for final submission to NHA.

Asprer said NHA has allotted 25,000 housing units for the city’s homeless families, most especially those affected by a series of demolitions, aimed at safeguarding and protecting the lives of those living in danger zones.

“The QC government will push harder the city’s advocacy for housing development for thousands of our constituents that need decent homes to live in. We will do our best to fulfill our promise to relocate families living in danger zones,” Bautista told reporters.

The mayor directed city legal officer Christian Valencia to immediately inquire from the Department of Finance, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and the Philippine Deposit Insurance Company on the status of the 80-hectare Banco Filipino property in Barangay Payatas, a site that could accommodate 24,000 housing units once turned into housing projects by the local government.

With this development, the mayor is expecting thousands of the city’s informal settlers will avail themselves of the housing units being offered to them by NHA.

The NHA housing is one of the three options offered to the local informal settlers for them to choose from.

Another option is to resettle in the QC’s socialized housing units either in Payatas, a housing project to be built by Habitat for Humanity or Kaligayahan by Phinma Properties and the last option is the “Balik Probinsya Program.”

Under the QC’s socialized housing project, Phinma is set to construct more than 800 housing units at the Arce homesite in Barangay Kaligayan. In Payatas, the Habitat for Humanity will build almost 400 units at the Oviedo homesite.

The mayor revealed that more policemen, teachers, firemen, jail officers and other government employees could avail themselves of the city’s socialized housing once completed next year as he expected that the bulk of informal settler’s families living in danger zones would be accommodated at the NHA housing sites either in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan or in Montalban (Rodriguez), Rizal.

Bautista ordered the fast-tracking of the development of the city’s big socialized housing projects, the first ever in the history in the local government units in line with his administration’s pro-poor program of building housing communities for the city’s underprivileged residents.

Its socialized housing project is a public private partnership which President Aquino is pushing in line with his Matuwid na Daan advocacy.

“The problem of poverty and informal settlements in QC is huge. But, we can help make this challenge manageable through the pathways of collaboration and partnership,” the city chief executive said. –Arlie O. Calalo, Daily Tribune