No shelter

When the houses of informal settlers get demolished, it's quite easy for the haves to look at widespread poverty and the inherent unfairness in the economic system as personal hurdles that one should surmount, instead of injustices that should be corrected by way of reform.

Last Tuesday, around 40 people were hurt in the demolition of informal dwellings at Corazon de Jesus, Pinaglabanan, San Juan City. There were rocks and bottles hurled from the side of the informal settlers protecting their abodes, while there were water cannons and tear gas canisters propelled from the side of the police. The cause of the violence: the community was to be levelled down to create a new City Hall.

Demolition is all too common in urban areas of the Philippines — particularly here in the National Capital Region — almost always under the guise of things like “beautification” and “modernization.” The poor will be there, obstacles in the way of development, almost always helpless against the sledgehammers and bulldozers of rich and powerful visionaries to the next few decades and centuries. Yet as common as demolition is, relocation has yet to become that empowering process to recover human dignity from shantytowns and squats. It's just a way to move one problem into another place.

Without electricity, running water, adequate transportation, and a stimulus for livelihood, a relocation area just becomes a place for a kind of destitution between urban life and rural life: one that permanently inscribes to a poor person the role of a “squatter.” Relocation, as is done in the Philippines, becomes just another game of survival, instead of a long-term commitment to recovering and restoring dignity for the poor among us.  Instead of the empowering tool that it should be, it's just moving a bunch of people to another place for others to worry about. That dehumanizing factor is what informal dwellers see and experience. Relocation is not a chance to be given a new shot at life; rather, it is exile from a place that really doesn't care much for you and your well-being.

If the poor have it within themselves to uplift their status in life, then they should have before they suffered. The suffering of the poor is not just from their own doing, but from the failure of society to watch out and care for each other, even in a place as close and as small as that strip of land in Pinaglabanan. It seemed, at least for the city government of San Juan, that the creation of a magnificent structure for running the day-to-day affairs of the city was more important than the welfare of the people in there, crying for help all along.

Granted that the poor should be given a chance to help themselves, but by the time a poor family is exiled into some remote area for the unforgivable urban crime of squatting, one faces a new set of problems that doesn't resolve the poor's lot, not by a long shot. We all have been exposed to a reality of poverty here in the Philippines: that it is not a personal choice to be poor, but that the lack of opportunities to be well-off — like education, proper healthcare, employment, and nutrition — are not equitable.

It takes reform — not willpower — to make relocation a commitment to restore dignity among the poor. It is that sense of dignity that empowers them to do better for themselves, and contribute to a better society. The measurement of our development is not merely in the absence of slums, but the opportunities present for those that are moved away from that kind of existence.