Vice President traces housing gains to bayanihan

MANILA, Philippines - Vice President and Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) concurrent chairman Noli De Castro traced the housing gains of the country to the strong spirit of bayanihan among various stakeholders in the sector.

“I believe that the gains that we have today can be attributed to our determination to work together despite the seemingly insurmountable constraints,” De Castro said during the 2nd Asia Pacific Housing Forum in Makati recently.

Even if the government lacks the financial resources, De Castro said it has in its midst an overflowing of goodwill from its people and institutions as well as agencies here and abroad.

De Castro admitted that the government does not have the resources to close the housing gap nor the organization to build all the needed houses. However, he said this does not mean that it is impotent in facing the difficult task of providing shelters.

“The key lies in mobilizing the support of all sectors of the Philippine society, including the beneficiaries themselves,” he said.

Such strategies and approaches, De Castro said, enabled the present administration to reap enough gains in housing.

From January 2001 to May 2009, De Castro told both local and foreign participants of the forum that the government was able to provide shelter assistance to an average of around 120, 000 low-income households per year or nearly a million families for the entire period.

He said slightly more than half of that number was accounted for by the asset reform initiatives of the government namely the community mortgage program, the resettlement program and the presidential proclamations program.

De Castro said the government also sustained efforts to promote capability-building and empowerment of its development partners. He said several programs are already in place, such as the Cities Development Strategies implemented by the League of Cities of the Philippines and supported by Official Development Assistance, the IMPACT or Integrated Approaches to Poverty Reduction at the Neighborhood Level implemented by HUDCC and supported by the Cities Alliance, the Housing Microfinance Initiatives of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Development of Poor Urban Communities Sector project funded by the Asian development bank, and the localized CMP.