No house for the poor

With the present Kadamay campaign for housing units for the poor, I remember this lecture by my colleague to young campus press writers on how to do social analysis. When the speaker asked what could be the reason why the poor remain poor, one student popped up an immediate answer, “They’re lazy.”

Lazy, the speaker repeated the word, then proceeded: Let me ask you, in a plantation, who toils to make sure the products we get are in good quality? The student replied, the workers. Now then, who earns from selling these goods? The businessman, he said. What did the businessman contribute to make the product good so that he can earn much? Silence.

It’s a matter of perspective how we look at the poor. The initial response is to be indignant at how the “lazy” poor people can ask for something they haven’t earned for.

But going back to that lecture, lazy is not how you describe people who have contributed much to our economy. Not when you see them build houses and high-rises 24/7 in the name of development. Not when millions of farm workers and factory workers do their tasks like machines do to meet the quota.

What you see is how workers are short-changed with minimum wages of around P290 to P310 outside of the National Capital Region. That is enough to put food on your plate, but barely enough for clothes, children’s schooling or medicines.

There are 24 million Filipinos who are agency-hired, or working in the non-formal sector. There are 22 million Filipinos living in extreme poverty, earning only about P60 pesos a day.

The National Housing Authority are tasked to look into this issue, but for years they have only delivered empty promises to the urban poor. The participants of the Occupy Pabahay movement in Bulacan themselves attest in an interview with Altermidya how government agencies have been asking them money yet failed to deliver their demand for houses.

There is a backlog of six million housing units for the poor. The lack of decent houses not only plagues the urban poor in Metro Manila, but also the Typhoon Pablo victims who staged their “occupy movement” in 2,500 housing units in San Antonio Village in Maparat, Compostela in Compostela Valley that were promised to them but never came.

The failure by government agencies in the past to do their tasks has forced the poor to go to such lengths as to occupy housing units to get attention. As National Anti-Poverty Commission chair Liza Maza points out, this is a crisis brought by neglect that needs an urgent response by giving decent social housing and services for the poor.

We hope this administration can deliver its promised change, as well as a change in our perspective on empowering the poor.--