Squatters

Every day, at the start of my drive to work, I see them. Their homes are but meters away from our gate and are built precariously on the banks of the river that passes near our home.

The politically correct term to call them nowadays is “informal settlers” but when I was growing up in the ’70s we called them “squatters” — people who would erect shanties and other semi-permanent structures on land they didn’t own. 

In the Quezon City of my childhood, there seemed to be fewer squatter communities. In fact, I recall that it was only in the 1980s when local politicians allowed them into their bailiwicks, in order to increase their voting base, that these communities started to flourish and become ubiquitous. “Ubiquitous” is a proper word to describe the current situation because you cannot travel from Fairview, where I live, to my law office in Ortigas without passing through large, well-entrenched squatter areas.

Squatters And Urban Blight

Some look at the squatter communities and think simply that they are eyesores and a blight on the city landscape. While squatter communities and slum areas certainly don’t make a city beautiful, the issue of squatting is complex and problematic and ultimately requires some frank discussion as well as a great deal of political will to address.

Squatters And The Law

Obviously, the act of trespassing into another person’s land and building a house on it is illegal per se and some might think that the fact that squatting is a legal violation means that the answer to squatting is simply law enforcement. However, understanding the context of the great social inequalities in the Philippines and the lack of affordable housing, so much so that some people are, in a sense, forced to squat or — in the terminology used in the squatter communities — “buy rights” makes the law enforcement approach to solving the squatters issue seem incomplete if not wholly ineffective. In fact, the painful truth is that even for those in the middle or even upper middle-class, owning your own home is a very difficult, at times even unattainable, proposition.

Squatters And Scarce Resources

Others see the slum communities not only as an eyesore but also a drain on vital resources. For those who work at least eight hours a day, with more than 30 percent of their salary withheld for taxes, knowing that a substantial portion of their hard-earned money goes to these squatter communities for health, education, and other expenses may not be a particularly pleasant idea. Some would argue that it is even unfair for those who strive to work, as compared to many in the slums who are unemployed, to have government essentially steal their wages in order to give it to those who dwell in the squatter areas.

Statistically, at most a tenth of our population pay taxes to support everyone else, a fact that those who believe in the maxim of self-reliance and personal liberty find unthinkable. In fact, libertarians, such as the economist Milton Friedman, claim that these inequalities between rich and poor are an inescapable reality of the human condition, which we must accept and that attempting to remove these inequities is an ultimately hopeless endeavor.

Perhaps on a purely economic level, the argument against addressing inequalities by providing resources and social services to the impoverished in these squatter communities, sourced from our tax money, may make sense; however, as moral beings, this argument is unacceptable. This will sound corny or hollow to those who do not believe in either Christianity or Islam but those who believe in an Abrahamic faith adhere to the principle that we are our brother’s keeper and, thus, we have a social responsibility towards squatters.

Squatters And The Culture Of Poverty

There are those who feel pity for squatters, given the often harsh conditions that they live in; however, I cannot pity them. To pity others, of whatever socio-economic class, is to degrade them; to see them as passive actors and not in control of their lives. I see squatters in the opposite light: they are, like all of us, masters of our destinies and we cannot degrade them by viewing them as purely victims of a harsh, unjust, and corrupt society.

To do so removes the opportunity to empower them, which is what we must do if we are to change their lives and, ultimately, to change our own future. While Moynihan’s “culture of poverty” takes the view that the poor — and those that live in slum areas — self-perpetuate their poverty. There a grain of truth to this view — we all know of tambays or lazy people in these communities who are content to live off their relatives or the dole-outs of their political patrons.

However, we must endeavor to empower the poor to overcome self-imposed cultures and beliefs that limit them.

Squatters And Ondoy

Finally, the fury of Ondoy hit the squatter communities the hardest, particularly because many were located in waterways and bridges. Analysts said that having numerous squatter communities in these waterways and the fact that the trash and garbage from these communities clogged the arteries of Metro Manila’s water system was a big reason for the horrendous flooding of the metropolis.

But instead of blaming these squatter communities, we should in fact learn an important lesson — what Ondoy served to demonstrate to all of us was the truth that that no matter what socio-economic class you belong to, whether you live in Forbes or Payatas, all Filipinos are interconnected and we cannot escape each other’s realities. The floods of Ondoy destroyed homes, lives, and futures without regard to class or political power.

It was a powerful, sobering lesson that, in fact, the future of these squatter communities and ours is deeply intertwined and if we desire a better future for ourselves and our children, then we cannot build that future without also improving the lives of the squatters.