HOUSING IS A TOP PRIORITY

prived, vote -rich segment has suffered for decades and is in dire need of social housing support.

For the incoming administration to cover a wide swath of socialized housing policy initiatives, I would like to offer some pieces of advice by enumerating actionable plans related to a Housing and Recovery Initiative (HRI). This is a social program with an overarching objective of easing the burden of the majority of our population who are still living in filth and sub-normal conditions.

As of last count, seven million houses are needed to stem the tide of a growing base of informal settlers, and if we annualize the staggering shortfall, current capacity can only construct anywhere from 2 percent to 3 percent of what the country urgently needs. Every year, social housing continues to elude those who need them the most and it is getting worse.

The HRI goal is to ease the burden of housing costs over time by boosting the supply of housing multifamily dwelling in every town or city. The plan must include legislative and executive actions with the objective of closing the housing supply shortfall in 10 years, starting with the construction of thousands of housing units under a funding facility guaranteed by local government units and supported by dedicated financing institutions.

The Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD) must play its part as the aggregator of all these services. Effectively, it must form the backbone of the housing ecosystem. The stakeholders (landowners, the contractors, construction suppliers, financial institutions, developers and the end users) can then fuel the initiative.

When aligned with other policies to reduce housing costs and ensure affordability, closing the gap will mean more affordable rents and more attainable homeownership. As part of the integrated HRI plan, the new leadership must collectively summon its energy to educate, promote, plan, enhance and initiate the following action plans dedicated solely for lower income groups.

I am sharing some of the goto action plans that the appointed executive and legislative branches can champion:

 Classify, identify and pilot slum areas and rehouse their residents in new standard and sanitary housing;

 Re-introduce public housing construction of lowcost dwelling units;

 Re-visit government subsidies and strengthen rent control;

 Incentivize cities and towns that will initiate socially and environmentally centric land use policies;

 Enhance Pag-IBIG and other similar social institutions with financing mechanisms to further encourage private investors and developers to build more vertical and horizontal developments with emphasis on providing mandatory housing benefit for government workers, teachers, police and armed forces, among others;

 Revisit existing charters of regulators that have restrictive covenants so they can expand the scope and improve existing forms of financing, with focus on multifamily, high density development;

 Promote the use of national, local, and COVID-19 recovery funds so it can be rechanneled to affordable housing supply;

 Provide additional tax credits to private developers engaged in constructing socialize housing;

 Enact laws to protect government-initiated supply of homes and other housing initiatives to make sure the beneficiaries are really the end users; and

 Work with the private sector to address supply chain challenges, price fluctuations and improve building efficiencies