Informal settlers in QC given reprieve

Hundreds of landless urban poor families living along river banks and esteros in Quezon City heaved a collective sigh of relief yesterday after the city council agreed to indefinitely defer the demolition of their shanties. The demolition was supposed to start today.

Councilor Nilo Sioson, Assistant Minority Floor Leader (District I) and Councilor Jesus Suntay (District IV), moved to stall the scheduled demolition after over a hundred residents of the urban poor community marched to the QC Council session hall yesterday to protest the demolition. Both are members of the City Council's committee on urban poor.

Bearing red flags and placards, members of the Alyansa ng mga Maralitang Taga-Ilog, an alliance of urban poor communities residing along river banks, decried what they said was the lack of a comprehensive policy to address their eviction.

"They're relocating us to the Kasiglahan Village in far away Montalban, away from our livelihood, and from the schools of our children," said Nerissa Guerrero, 47, chairperson of the Concerned Women's League, a group organized under the alliance. Hers is a common complaint heard from urban poor community members about to be resettled.

Another problem is that living in the village, supposedly part of the socialized housing program of the Estrada administration, may be to be expensive for the settlers as each housing unit is priced at close to P500,000. Most informal settlers are unskilled workers who earn a living as stevedores, street vendors, and construction workers. The women work either as laundry women or street vendors. Very few work in the factories.

"We can't afford to pay," Guerrero said. She represents a community of over 200 families living along the banks of a river in Kainging Bukid, Apolonio Samson in Frisco district.

Urban plight is a major social concern in a city now brimming with over a hundred thousand landless urban poor families.

The Quezon City Hall has drafted a plan to clear the city's clogged esteros, canals and rivers of urban poor communities, which planners have blamed for floods. They also said the communities face the danger of being swept away by floods.

But urban poor organizations in Metro Manila have been criticizing the government for its allegedly haphazard social housing program. Earlier, the Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahirap (Kadamay) said that in the last two months alone, close to 2,000 families have been displaced by demolitions in Muntinlupa, Pasig, Makati and Quezon cities without any adequate provision for resettlement.

The national government has also launched a project to clear the banks of the Pasig River or urban poor communities in a renewed drive to rehabilitate the dying river system. Several other urban poor communities have been targeted for dismantling to give way to government development projects.