Marcos says gov't to speed up distribution of houses for Yolanda survivors
MANILA, Philippines — The government is working to expedite the distribution of housing units and land titles to the survivors displaced by Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos said Wednesday.
Ten years after one of the world’s strongest storms obliterated communities, the government still has not finished building 44,283 housing units intended for families displaced by the storm, according to state auditors.
“We have engaged the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development and the National Housing Authority to accelerate the provision of housing units and land titles to our beneficiaries,” Marcos said.
In a 2022 annual report on the NHA, the Commission on Audit noted that only 78.94% of the 210,317 revised target housing units under the government’s Yolanda Permanent Housing Program have been completed.
Thirty-one percent of the completed housing units remain unoccupied. Of those, 9,329 houses have been turned over to local government units but are still unoccupied due to the “no demolition, no relocation” policy.
During the Yolanda commemoration event in Tacloban City, Marcos and House Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez distributed land titles to housing beneficiaries.
"This is not merely a piece of paper. It represents our commitment to providing a stable and secure future for our people. It symbolizes hope, permanence, and the dream of every resident of Tacloban to have a place they can genuinely call home," Romualdez said.
‘Substandard’ houses
According to Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez, around 18,000 housing units were constructed for residents affected by Yolanda. Around 5,000 of those need to be repaired.
“Almost half of the houses that were built in 2013 up to 2016, most of them actually, were incomplete and substandard,” Romualdez said in an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel.
“We promised all these people in the danger zones that we’re moving them to safer places and providing them a house to live in,” he added.
The mayor said the local government has cleared around 70% of areas classified as “danger zones,” and relocated some 40,000 families to housing units in north Tacloban.
In June 2020, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution calling on governments “to take the right to adequate housing into account in strategies for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change, as well as in planning, preparing and implementing strategies for addressing climate change displacement.”
The council also urged States to work with affected communities in developing and promoting environmentally sustainable and sound housing design, construction and maintenance to address the effects of climate change.
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