Mandaue’s fiery New Year

FOR some 551 families in two Mandaue City barangays, the year started with a nightmare. They lost their houses in two of four fires that hit the city in just two hours, as the old year gave way to the new.

Neither Sitio Salvacion in Barangay Maguikay nor Sitio Sto. Niño in Barangay Guizo made it to a list last year of the 20 sitios in Mandaue City that were considered most vulnerable to large fires. Guizo, however, was one of two barangays where, less than 10 months ago, an inferno left more than 2,000 families homeless.

As one response to the March 2016 fire, the Mandaue City Fire Department recommended that the City’s disaster management office make sure that each barangay should have at least 20 fire extinguishers.

While that will help, the City’s leaders know they will need other solutions to make residents, especially in vulnerable communities, safer from fire, floods and other hazards that threaten congested urban settlements.

One challenge that Guizo and Maguikay share, in this case, is that the lots the fire survivors occupied belong to several private entities. That practically rules out re-blocking, which other cities like Cebu have successfully adopted to allow fire trucks and other emergency vehicles better access to interior communities.

For Mandaue City’s officials, this is a tricky puzzle: how do you balance the provision of shelter to the vulnerable, with the need to enforce the property rights of landowners?

In most cases, eviction is hardly the answer. In the 2008 report “Housing the Poor in Asian Cities,” two United Nations agencies recommended arrangements like land-sharing as some of the most humane and cost-effective ways of making communities safer. These agencies estimated that no more than 20 percent of all informal settlers in Asian cities should have to be resettled because they occupy land urgently needed for new roads, drainage, flood control or essential government buildings.

Do Mandaue’s newly homeless families belong to that 20 percent? That’s just one of many questions the City will have to answer. We hope that public officials, lot owners and fire survivors find a compromise that will somehow balance their competing rights and interests.