Statistics belie HUDCC housing report — CREBA

The Chamber of Real Estate and Builders’ Associations (CREBA) said yesterday that serious inaccuracies in the housing production report of government agencies prevent the Estrada administration from effectively addressing the critical housing problem.

Reacting to the recent publicized report of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) that a "total of 274,727 housing constructions were started within the year," CREBA said no less than the latest NEDA report belies this claim.

NEDA reported that as of the third quarter this year, the construction industry which includes housing registered a negative seven-percent growth. This is based on the number of building permits issued, without which new housing construction cannot be started.

The National Statistics Office also reported that as of the second quarter of the year, only a total of 15,876 building permits for the residential construction have been issued. This is down from the 17,731 permits issued for the same period in 1999.

Moreover, CREBA said, the summary report of the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) on the licenses to sell issued from January to May this year shows only a total of 3,473 housing starts (1,481 house/lot and 1,992 lot units) by private developers.

This is contrary to the HUDCC’s earlier report that "as of end June 2000 a total of 204,612 households were provided with shelter security," CREBA said.

Since the HUDCC’s June report is highly inaccurate, CREBA said, its October report which merely supplements and is based on the earlier reports, is just as inaccurate.

CREBA also said that the units credited as production of the Home Guaranty Corp. (HGC) for this year were actually started in 1998. This includes 34,500 units in ERAP City, a project initiated during the Ramos administration and approved for implementation during former HUDCC chairman Karina David’s term.

The figures credited to National Home Mortgage Finance Corp. (NHMFC) also do not constitute new units of shelter of beneficiaries of CMP projects approved as early as 1999, both for which financing was realized by the NHMFC only this year.

For the National Housing Authority (NHA), CREBA said, more than half of the "production" figure in the HUDCC report does not comprise new units of "shelter security", since the activities involved do not add new housing stock in terms of new developed lot, house/lot or housing units.

CREBA said that the NHA’s so-called production involves mostly slum upgrading (i.e. provision of basic facilities in existing squatter/slum colonies), land tenure assistance, (i.e. fund lending of a maximum of P60,000 to identified beneficiaries), and resettlement assistance (i.e. technical and personnel assistance to LGUs in squatter relocation/resettlement).

This inaccurate reporting serves to lull the government into a false sense of complacency that it is doing something tangible about the critical housing backlog, when in fact it is not, CREBA said, even as if it further fuels dissatisfaction and unrest not only within the housing industry but among the homeless millions as well.

CREBA stressed that the HUDCC’s housing program has never taken off, anchored as it is on the Multi-Window Lending System (MWLS) which fails to inspire confidence in both the housing industry and the banking sector.

Notwithstanding massive propaganda efforts by the government, CREBA said, the housing industry which has never fully recovered from the massive bankruptcies of private developers in the crises of 1983, 1990 and 1997, will never again venture on mass-scale production of socialized and low-income housing, without the assurance of a permanent, stable and substantial homebuyer financing system.

The HUDCC’s MWLS fails to address this financing imperative, CREBA said, as it relies solely on commitments by the so-called funders, which are not only insufficient to meet the Estrada administration’s production target of 350,000 housing units per year, but which are also highly uncertain in terms of the time and conditions for funding releases.