Homeless and hopeless

Everyone dreams of residing in a decent home. Owning, or even leasing, a house is a fair aspiration for all families. Not having one is depressing, demoralizing, distressing.

- ARIEL NEPOMUCENO

And the state has the obligation to create an environment where all the citizens, with a reasonable level of labor, shall have access to a safe place to live in.

However, more than 4.5 million Filipinos are considered informal settlers. We used to call them squatters. Slum dwellers. Improving the semantics did not change their dismal conditions at all. We just hid the problem under the rug. The electoral cycle accorded them the rare power to be tolerated because of the votes they cast. Who would want to gain their ire? The ballots will reject whoever is brave enough to remove them from their houses. They would fight and risk imprisonment or even any conceivable physical harm defending their right to remain in the slums that they consider home.

Influx of Filipinos to the capital in pursuit of better lives. At least 43 percent of our urban population are desperately surviving the sub-human existence in these areas. More than two-thirds of them are in the National Capital Region (NCR). The phenomenon was primarily caused by the uneven regional economic development in our country. The Manila-centric growth enticed the dreamers in the rural provinces to venture to the more developed cities in the NCR beginning in the late 1970s.