Pambansang Pabahay Para sa Pilipino

The dream of every Filipino consists of two things – a good education and a house they can call home. In the late 1970’s, then president Ferdinand Marcos created what he called a secondary mortgage market system under Presidential Decree 1267 for housing as a means of tapping funds from the private sector and supplementing available housing funds.

As the former president explained in his book “The New Philippine Republic,” several participating banks joined hands with the government in pooling resources for housing. It was also in the late 70’s that former president Marcos created the Home Development Mutual Fund which institutionalized a system of voluntary contribution for housing purposes where no central provident fund for housing ever existed prior. To date, the journey for every “Juan’s” dream home continues.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s Pambansang Pabahay Para sa Pilipino Program: Zero ISF by 2028 is a great time for private developers to recover from the crippling impact of COVID-19 in the housing and real estate sector. At the helm of this program is Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD) Secretary Jose Rizalino Acuzar, who stressed that the priority housing program is not only designed to address the current housing backlog but also, and correspondingly as important, to tap the massive economic pump-priming potential of the housing industry.

At an event themed “Change-proofing the Industry: Building Homes for Filipinos, Today and Tomorrow,” the National Developers Convention 2022 tackled the new administration’s priorities for the housing industry as well as the importance of digitalization to throw light on the emerging challenges brought by the pandemic and global economic crisis.

At this event, the DHSUD secretary also formally declared the Marcos administration’s new housing program—the Pambansang Pabahay Para sa Pilipino, where he discussed the specific plan of the new administration to build a projected one million housing units per year to tackle not only the 6.5 million housing backlog of the country but also the two major gridlocks of affordability and access to funds.

As a proud resident of Quezon City, the DHSUD and the Quezon City government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a housing project in the city, launching the Marcos administration’s housing program. Hope lies in dreams as they say and sometimes, an out-of-the-box solution is all it takes. “We want everybody happy,” as Secretary Acuzar says, and in light of such a program, it seems everybody – from the government to the private sector, home buyers and beneficiaries of housing programs – will certainly be.

The best part in all this is a listening President as well as his secretary who insist on inputs in order for their plans to succeed. It’s great to see this sector bounce back and everybody is indeed excited – and who wouldn’t be? A home for every Filipino family is a dream come true and from what I’ve learned from history, the dream for progressive Filipinos is alive today and certainly, this sounds good to me.