The government is offering P18,000 to each of the 20,000 families of informal settlers living along waterways in Metro Manila so they can rent decent and safe homes elsewhere for 12 months while officials are looking for a place to resettle them permanently.
But the NGO Urban Poor Associates (UPA) sees the government offer—its monthly equivalent of P1,500 is just enough to rent a room in a squatter colony—as a “band-aid solution” to the housing problem.
“We did some pencil-pushing. It’s cheaper if we give them P18,000 to go to a safe place,” Interior Undersecretary Francisco Fernandez, the official in charge of relocating 100,000 families in the metropolis out of danger areas, said in an interview by phone.