“Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.”

– Noah Cross, Chinatown

“‘Course I’m respectable.  I’m old.”

Someday I’ll post in detail about Chinatown, because it (and its spiritual cousin, True Confessions) is a great film about housing development and municipal infrastructure, whose economic power did much to define Los Angeles – a city that grew where it wanted to grow.

Self-gerrymandered with self-interest in mind: Los Angeles

In a similar way, the typhoon-battered city of Manila is now proposing to grow by relocation, moving those who lived on its squalid and polluted river banks out to a new city a-building.  As reported in Bulatlat:

16 Oct 2009: Relocation Solution Poses a Dilemma to Slum Dwellers Made Homeless by Ondoy

Days after Ondoy struck, the government declared that it would no longer allow these poor Filipinos to return to their shattered homes.

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

What is the ‘home’ to go back to?  Disaster can create an urban palimpsest, wiping away everything but the land itself.  So, as in Joe Slovo in Cape Town, we have the tension – an urgent need to do something very quickly, and a unique opportunity to do something very profound.

MANILA – In the aftermath of typhoon Ondoy, many were quick to blame the urban poor living along the creeks, waterways and riverbanks of Metro Manila. Their shanties and their garbage block these sewage systems, hence worsening the impact of the typhoon, so goes the familiar criticism.

Nonsense.  While I have not toured the now-destroyed riverbank slums, the pictures I saw at the Asia-Pacific Housing Forum, coupled with the scale of flooding, make this claim just about impossible. 

Days after the disaster, the government declared that it would no longer allow these poor Filipinos to return to their shattered homes.  Vice President Noli de Castro, who also chairs the Housing Urban Development Coordinating Council, confirmed in a news report that the families who were living along waterways and riverbanks would no longer be allowed to rebuild their homes in those areas.

Mr. de Castro’s long been interested in housing and slums

Anti-poor, or another reason?

He said government-acquired lands outside of the metropolis are more than enough to give homes to the displaced victims of Ondoy.

A good idea … if built fast enough.

De Castro offered 1,400 houses that may be utilized as relocation sites for displaced victims of Ondoy.

Sounds better …

Of these, 400 units are located in Towerville Resettlement in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan; 250 units in Southville 4 in Sta. Rosa, Laguna; 500 units in Southville 5 in Biñan, Laguna; and 250 units in Southville 5-A, also in Biñan.

Metro Manila – growing like Los Angeles

That’s the alternative offered – not a return to the insecure, filthy, disease-ridden rabbit warrens you knew, but to cleanly blocked and properly built new house.  There’s a powerful case for it.

“Our cities are so bad I sometimes wonder if we should just build completely new ones from scratch.”

– Quote from a Mexican expert at the AHI symposium

Mexico City, 28-30 October, 2009

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

Imagine if you could de-densify the slums by expanding the city.  Can you?

He said there are 5,721 lots that may be developed to accommodate the displaced families.

Reblocking – Solly Angel’s arterial grid of dirt roads, plus security of tenure in your own plot of land – is a powerful combination.  Give people s plan and confidence in their piece of it and they will build.

“Technically, there is nothing wrong with the relocation of the families living along the areas that the government deems as danger zones,” Jon Vincent Marin, spokesman of the urban-poor group Kadamay, told Bulatlat.

A group worthy of your support

I bumped into Kadamay at Asia-Pacific.  I liked their thinking and tend to trust their perspectives.  Nor is he an unthinking doomsayer:

Marin emphasized that their organization understands the direct and immediate threat that storm surges could bring to these families.

Yet he’s a further realist:

“But if they will be relocated to areas where there is no social services and job opportunities, then there is something wrong with the relocation,” he pointed out.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Will the government follow through by creating not just a relocation camp but an actual city beyond the city?

“The government thinks that the only solution to the problem is to relocate urban-poor communities outside Metro Manila where they would not survive,” Marin said.

People move to cities in search of a better life.  Relocating them to the far countryside without income opportunities is like pulling up weeds and transplanting them to the desert; they’ll die, and your city will still have weeds.

He said these families would eventually return to the metropolis and live along the riverbanks and waterways because their condition in the relocation areas are worse than what they would be leaving behind in Metro Manila.

One cannot repatriate people into the rural poverty and expect them to stay here.  But you can bring the city to the country.  Paging Noah Cross.

Or should we?

“I’m going to bring LA to the water.”

As a participant at AHI’s recent Mexico City symposium on land irresolution commented, “People can become urbanized without moving.”

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

Chinatown’s Noah Cross wanted the valley to become Los Angeles simply to boost the value of its land.  He had no thought of affordability except insofar as it could be achieved by building blocks and locks of houses.  “The future, Mister Gitts, the future!” 

Marin said the mere location of the resettlement areas pose problems to the families. “Most of these relocation sites are located in remote areas. They would have no source of income there. Naturally, they would want to go back to the metropolis, where at least they would have something to eat.”

He didn’t foresee that LA would grow so vast that even the valley would be built-up and dense, or that its most enduring feature would be the marvelous grid of streets, not the boxy bungalows he scattered like a human orchard.  He can be excused his lack of foresight regarding the need for social infrastructure, but the Manilans have no such excuse.

“At the right time, and in the right place, a man is capable of just about anything.”

In a recent relief operation, the Citizen’s Disaster Response Center found that most of the houses in the resettlement area in Marilao, Bulacan, had been washed away. “The houses there were made from substandard materials,” deputy executive director Carlos Padolina told Bulatlat. He said the walls were mere layers of hallow blocks and without the thick metal braces inside that would have supported these.

You must fix the houses.  You must fix the income-generation possibilities.

Should the “relocatees” choose to continue working in Metro Manila, they would have to spend so much for their fares to go home to their new homes, the transportation cost eating into the little income they have.

Manila waterway slums before the typhoon: bathing

In such a case, the families would solve their problem by geographically dividing: the earner in the city, his or her family in the country.  That’s family-destabilizing.  So is this:

Marin added that most of the relocation sites do not have access to basic services such as hospitals and schools.

City-building involves building new economies.  If you want people to come, you must build it.  Build a social infrastructure: homes, schools, jobs, shopping, safety.  Expand the city; bring it to the country.

And since the framework of the housing services of the government is profit-oriented, the resettlement units are not given free.

That’s sound policy: People value only what they pay for.

Be it ever some humble, you should pay something for it

Only this week, de Castro said that the resettlement for the victims of Ondoy will be offered at an “affordable” package of two-year moratorium on their payments, with a monthly amortization of roughly P200 at 6% per annum that is payable in 30 years.

That’s an extremely affordable monthly payment. 

But Marin said that “even if it’s just P300 to P500 a month, we have to consider the kind of jobs that they have. They have children to feed and to send to school.”

Yes, affordability is measured relative to income.  It has to be.

“For a genuine housing service for the poor,” Marin said, “a big fund is needed.” But he told Bulatlat that these projects of the government only receive 0.4 to 0.6 percent of the total budget for the expenditure of the government.

Affordable housing is expensive for government.  Money is a gating factor. 

No entry into housing without money

More money is better – but some money is much better than no money, and smart money is best of all.

 “Relocation should not only include houses. It should include social services and livelihood for the people,” Marin said.

In a statement, Kadamay reiterated that the devastation that Ondoy has brought could be the perfect opportunity for the government to change their housing projects for the poor.

Yes, if one can move quickly and wisely.  Not easy.

“We should all remember that the poor communities living along the riverbanks and waterways are only there because of too much poverty, lack of job opportunities, source of livelihood and social services,” he said. “They are not dusts that the government can sweep under the rug.” (Bulatlat.com)

If that happens, it will be as Noah Cross put it:

“‘Course I’m respectable.  I’m old.  Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

– Noah Cross, Chinatown

“And I lasted long enough”

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Manila, yesterday

Sonia Fadraigo, Federation leader and Board member of AHI’s client Slum Dwellers International wrote this morning:

Federation not OK.  Badly hit.  Biggest disaster ever.  Don’t know where to start.  Still gathering info as to how many died.  Thousands of Fed members lost their houses – washed out by the floods.  We need help.  Thank you for the concern.  Please pray for us.  Another typhoon coming.

Three weeks ago I was in Manila, at the Second Asia-Pacific Housing Forum, speaking about slum redevelopment as an urban poverty solution.  It rained the entire time, but the locals said, this isn’t rain.

I flew home.

SDI Secretariat awaits further news. National Federations on standby to go to Manila if possible and if needed.

Remember Hurricane Katrina? 

What it did to New Orleans?  How it completely changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans?

Now imagine Katrina with informal self-built slums, inadequate plumbing and sanitation, and limited municipal infrastructure.

Help the Phillippines.

More information here.

UPDATE: Among the many worthwhile disaster-response charities working in the Philippines, we particularly recommend Habitat for Humanity Asia-Pacific (HFHAP), which has a donation link on their home page: http://www.habitat.org/ap/.

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