Hope for the homeless
Published Jun 10, 2022 12:05 am
charlie gorayeb
By Charlie Gorayeb
Charlie Gorayeb
The country’s real estate industry has good reasons to hope that the country’s housing backlog now affecting some 6.7 million poor families will receive higher priority in the next six years under the administration of President-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos, Jr.
With his overwhelming victory at the recent polls, the Chamber of Real Estate and Builders’ Associations, Inc. (CREBA) looks forward to housing concerns being included among the new administration’s priority agenda.
The problem of homelessness has continued to escalate, despite 35 years having elapsed since adoption of the Constitutional mandate for an urban land reform and housing program for the underprivileged.
Myriad problems besetting the housing effort have remained unresolved, the major ones being lack of affordable and effective homebuyer financing mechanisms that targeted the truly underprivileged, inaccessibility of land, over-regulation and bottlenecks in the licensing and permitting processes for land and housing development, especially at the local government level.
With the Marcos win, the housing sector anticipates a cohesive, concrete and well-targeted approach towards a lasting solution, as the incoming President’s forebears had pursued in the past.
It will be recalled that the holistic concept of human settlements and the proposition that shelter is one of the 11 basic needs of man were first adopted in the country during the time of the Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr. It was also during this time that the National Housing Authority (NHA), the Pag-IBIG Fund and the secondary mortgage market system were created, and landmark legislations such as the Social Housing Law (BP 220) and Subdivision Buyers Protective Decree (PD 957) were promulgated.
These developments spurred a growth momentum for the housing sector under the auspices of the then Ministry of Human Settlements led by former First Lady Imelda Marcos.
Preparatory to the official opening of the incoming 19th Congress, CREBA is currently finalizing legislative proposals for a comprehensive public housing program and a homebuyer financing assistance program as part of its five-point housing agenda which targets the production of 500,000 units per year or a total of 10 million homes in two decades to underpin a necessarily massive national housing effort.
Housing the underprivileged is not only a social and moral imperative for government, but also an economic one, since housing activity catalyzes business opportunities in dozens of downstream industries.
No doubt President-elect Marcos’ newly appointed economic team of illustrious experts are well aware of this, and thus we are hopeful they will be supportive once they have studied our recommendations.
If our country’s economy is to recover speedily from the COVID devastation, to our mind, a truly meaningful, mass-scale public housing program should be the administration’s centerpiece, given housing’s unparalleled capital-intensive as well as economic, tax and labor multiplier effects.
(Charlie A. V. Gorayeb is the national chairman of CREBA, the largest umbrella association of developers, builders, contractors, supplies manufacturers and professionals engaged in housing and various types of real estate development. With close to 30 chapters all over the Philippines, it has built a reputation of being the 'vanguard' of the real estate industry since 1973.)
Charlie Gorayeb
The country’s real estate industry has good reasons to hope that the country’s housing backlog now affecting some 6.7 million poor families will receive higher priority in the next six years under the administration of President-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos, Jr.
With his overwhelming victory at the recent polls, the Chamber of Real Estate and Builders’ Associations, Inc. (CREBA) looks forward to housing concerns being included among the new administration’s priority agenda.
The problem of homelessness has continued to escalate, despite 35 years having elapsed since adoption of the Constitutional mandate for an urban land reform and housing program for the underprivileged.
Myriad problems besetting the housing effort have remained unresolved, the major ones being lack of affordable and effective homebuyer financing mechanisms that targeted the truly underprivileged, inaccessibility of land, over-regulation and bottlenecks in the licensing and permitting processes for land and housing development, especially at the local government level.
With the Marcos win, the housing sector anticipates a cohesive, concrete and well-targeted approach towards a lasting solution, as the incoming President’s forebears had pursued in the past.
It will be recalled that the holistic concept of human settlements and the proposition that shelter is one of the 11 basic needs of man were first adopted in the country during the time of the Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr. It was also during this time that the National Housing Authority (NHA), the Pag-IBIG Fund and the secondary mortgage market system were created, and landmark legislations such as the Social Housing Law (BP 220) and Subdivision Buyers Protective Decree (PD 957) were promulgated.
These developments spurred a growth momentum for the housing sector under the auspices of the then Ministry of Human Settlements led by former First Lady Imelda Marcos.
Preparatory to the official opening of the incoming 19th Congress, CREBA is currently finalizing legislative proposals for a comprehensive public housing program and a homebuyer financing assistance program as part of its five-point housing agenda which targets the production of 500,000 units per year or a total of 10 million homes in two decades to underpin a necessarily massive national housing effort.
Housing the underprivileged is not only a social and moral imperative for government, but also an economic one, since housing activity catalyzes business opportunities in dozens of downstream industries.
No doubt President-elect Marcos’ newly appointed economic team of illustrious experts are well aware of this, and thus we are hopeful they will be supportive once they have studied our recommendations.
If our country’s economy is to recover speedily from the COVID devastation, to our mind, a truly meaningful, mass-scale public housing program should be the administration’s centerpiece, given housing’s unparalleled capital-intensive as well as economic, tax and labor multiplier effects.
(Charlie A. V. Gorayeb is the national chairman of CREBA, the largest umbrella association of developers, builders, contractors, supplies manufacturers and professionals engaged in housing and various types of real estate development. With close to 30 chapters all over the Philippines, it has built a reputation of being the 'vanguard' of the real estate industry since 1973.)