Community-Managed Housing

A Context

There has been a rapid onset of urbanization in the Philippines as cities strive to find their niche in the global marketplace.  This phenomenon is often associated with economic progression as it brings new technological innovations, massive investment-driven activities and major infrastructure developments in various urban centers in the country. These trends have resulted to an increase in demand for land in prime locations, thus land conversion becomes requisite for expanding economic investments. Furthermore, land prices escalate to a point of becoming unaffordable to the poor. This pressing issue compels the impoverished sector to live in slum settlements where land security and housing are in a deplorable state. Force eviction and massive displacement resulting from development or investment-driven infrastructure projects are major threats commonly encountered by slum dwellers for occupying public and private-owned lands.

Whilst, there is an emerging concern attendant to securing land tenure for urban slums, housing shortage in the Philippines is increasing in a disproportionate rate with approximately 3.75 million housing backlog in 2010. By year 2030, it is projected that urban slum population will be close to 23 million which is more than 43% of the Philippine urban population (www.nscb.gov.ph, 2010). With these resulting effects of urbanization, the biggest challenge to the housing sector will be one of scale.

A lack of access to affordable finance, expensive cost of urban land, and government’s institutional and funding gaps are major constraints to slum dwellers in upgrading their physical environment and housing condition. It is now becoming evident that partnership between different stakeholders such as the government, urban poor communities, private and civil society sectors while drawing on the varying resources that they have is a crucial factor in delivering sustainable housing solutions and services at scale.

2. The Philippine Alliance and Its Proactive Response

The enormity and complexity of issues confronting the urban slums have gained the attention of the Philippine Alliance, inducing the institution to test and mainstream the community-led framework to address such issues as lack of security of land tenure and access to basic services and decent housing.

The Philippine Alliance is consists of Homeless People’s Federation Philippines, Inc. (HPFPI), a national network of 200 urban poor associations seeded in 14 cities and 16 municipalities across the country, and its intermediary support institution, the Philippine Action for Community-led Shelter Initiatives, Inc. (PACSII).  As the implementing arm of the Alliance, HPFPI has been involved in mobilizing urban informal settlers and slum dwellers around issues of land tenure, shelter, slum upgrading and disaster. It uses savings as main strategy for organizing and development. On the other hand, PACSII as the alliance’s executing arm provides support to HPFPI in terms of fund intermediation, policy direction, program design, fund sourcing and management, institutional development, legal assistance, documentation, facilitation of horizontal learning exchanges and capacity building programs and forges linkages between HPFPI and other stakeholders. The Alliance partners with the government, academic institutions, and professional organizations to support community upgrading and housing initiatives of HPFPI and their network communities. It promotes community-driven processes in all its undertakings where people create social spaces and define means to mobilize their own resources, engage with different actors and influence city-level platforms for the advancement of pro-poor agenda.

In Iloilo City, the presence of a unified network of urban poor federations called Iloilo City Urban Poor Network, and the Alliance’s existing city-level engagements, citywide savings and community-led upgrading program were salient factors which made the city as a potential testing ground and learning hub for community-managed housing initiatives. Building on these citywide processes and with endorsement from Slum Dweller’s International[1], the Philippine Alliance was chosen as the third implementing partner (next to India and Kenya) of the Community –led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF) Program in 2007.  

3. CLIFF Overview

The Community-led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF) is a venture capital facility which enables organized urban poor communities leverage greater public, private and civil society sector resources for housing and basic services delivery. This international programme is funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and Department for International Development (DFID), and being managed by a UK-based NGO, the Homeless International.

In the Philippines, CLIFF Programme intends to provide sustainable and affordable housing to low-income families through a housing loan. The first phase of CLIFF is divided into two subprojects: the 21 unit KABALAKA Housing Demonstration in Zone 1, Calumpang, Molo and the 172 unit Community-Managed Resettlement Housing in San Isidro Relocation Site,Jaro, Iloilo City. Both projects invest on community-driven and participatory processes in all project stages from planning, housing design, procurement, construction management and over-all project development.  Learnings gained from Iloilo City’s innovative practices and strategies on community-managed housing are now being replicated to other potential CLIFF expansion communities in other regions.

For the current phase of CLIFF, the Philippine Alliance targets to implement 14 new community-driven housing projects in 8 cities/municipalities where public and private sector collaboration is strong with fertile ground for scaling-up innovative financing of low-cost housing projects. Of these, 4 CLIFF expansion projects are projected for Iloilo City thus far. These will cater the city’s low-income households who were relocated in government resettlement sites but have limited access to affordable housing finance, and those currently living in high-risk areas and facing eviction and demolition cases.

The following are some of the housing units constructed by the federation