With at least 100,000 house and room renters facing eviction for non-payment of lease, the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means filed a bill making available refinancing options for over two million households living in apartment units and rented rooms in the country.
(ALI VICOY / FILE PHOTO / MANILA BULLETIN)
Albay Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda filed House Bill 7665 that proposes the grant of rent refinancing loans to cover at least one year rent of tenants.
HB 7665 also provides for a three month moratorium on eviction to allow both tenants and landlords to renegotiate rent under the options in the proposal.
“The Bayanihan rent deferments are good, but because it takes people longer than three months to find new jobs, we still run the risk of eviction unless we can find ways to get pending rent paid now, and allow tenants more time to finance their rent,” said Salceda, referring to the provisions of the Bayanihan law.
Salceda said granting tenants the right to defer payment may adversely affect landlords. He said many of lessors are retirees who “need to eat, too.”
Under RA 7665, the Social Security System (SSS), the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), and the Pag-IBIG Fund are mandated to offer rent refinancing loans to their members, at favorable rates.
It also mandates the Landbank of the Philippines and the Development Bank of the Philippines to offer rent refinancing loans at rates not higher than their lowest-yielding loans.
Under rent refinancing, the banks will pay rent for some determined period, say, one year, while providing the tenant a much longer loan repayment period.
“The Philippine Statistics Authority, in the 2015 Census of Population and Housing, estimates that some 2.7 million households occupy rented housing. We estimate this number to have increased to 3.1 million in 2020,” Salceda bared.
“Our analysis of the newly-unemployed shows that up to three of these households, or some 93,000 households, may be in danger of eviction due to nonpayment of rent dues even with the Bayanihan measures to provide rent relief,” he said.
The senior administration lawmaker explained that these households need measures for deferred payment scheduled but must “actually get the rent paid for a period that is long enough to regain meaningful employment are urgently needed. “
In his proposal, Salceda allowed promissory notes to be accepted, under an arrangement where government financial institutions will release fund for the promissory note and convert the rent obligation into a loan.
To allow tenants some time to avail of the programs under the bill, it also imposes an eviction moratorium for three months upon the effectivity of the bill, to provide the implementing agencies enough time to rollout the measures contained in this bill.
The bill also mandates setting up rental assistance centers by the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD) to help tenants and lessors renegotiate terms of lease, access programs under this bill, and find other assistance programs available that would prevent tenants from being evicted.
“While current grace periods under the Bayanihan emergency measures allow for amortizations to be distributed among succeeding months of rent, these grace periods may not be of much help to tenants that have totally lost their sources of income,” Salceda explained in the explanatory note of the bill.