Land Rights among the Urban Poor of the Philippines

Raineer Chu, Bangkok Encarnacao Alliance Consultation, 2004

What finally convinced me to work on land rights for the urban poor was what I saw in Tatalon, years after the title to the land there was awarded to the squatters. In just five years, the cardboard shacks and make-shift huts disappeared, with no apparent outside intervention.

I visited Tatalon for the first time in 1979 when Viv Grigg invited me to help the ministry there. I was just a law student then. We slept in one of those make-shift huts. Viv and two others lived there. The land then was really under great spiritual oppression; poverty was rampant. Many people died in the attempts of the landowner to drive out the squatters. There were many criminal elements inside the community and illegal drugs abounded.

When finally President Marcos ordered the awarding of the land to the squatters, something miraculous happened. Criminality went down. Best of all, the houses improved. I saw each day how the homeowners brought parts and tidbits home. Little by little, they rebuilt their houses. One day, a used window came and was put up, another day, just a bag of cement, or a rusty tin roof full of holes. In time, the cardboards disappeared and in its place, concrete blocks. In five years, the whole landscaped changed. 

In the time before the awarding of the title, hundreds of attempts were made to raise the living standard in the community, and equally, hundreds failed. The effort and exhaustion showed on the workers who tried their best to lift the lives of the people. What made the difference?

The land title gave the people hope. The father who brought home a bag of cement lovingly worked on the walls, knowing the house would be forever his. Land tenure made the difference. Hope is a vital factor in building communities. Hope moves the people forward with great enthusiasm and endurance. Without hope, work is hard and the people apathetic.

It was with this worldview that I started the work in Payatas. For years, our team had avoided involvement in land rights issues. The process was long and complicated, sometimes bloody. The opportunity came one day when the landowner approached our team to try and help in the situation. The opportunity before us was the biggest land acquisition in the whole Payatas, benefiting more than 500 families, covering 2 hectares of prime land.

The first agenda was to reconcile the four neighborhood associations inside the community. They had been at each other’s throat for years. Eight years to be exact. It was that long too that the land rights network had been fighting for the land, up to the Court of Appeal (and lost, when the adverse counsel was appointed justice of the Supreme Court. The Bureau of Lands of the government fighting alongside the squatters lost hope too after that.).

Payatas is a land title legal nightmare. There are more than 100,000 squatter families living there on more than 3,000 hectares of land. Most of the land is covered by fake titles. Payatas is the favorite dumping site of the government not only for garbage but also for squatters evicted from other places in Metro Manila and this proliferation of squatters has spawned more controversies over land rights. For each ambitious and aspiring politician who help them resettle into Payatas often do it with wild promise, to give them their own land.

 But no matter how fake the title is, the fact is that under the Philippine laws, if a title is contained in the government records, it is presumed valid and authentic. It would cost at least one million pesos and ten long years for a litigant to successfully revoke a title. The option is to acknowledge the title and pay for the costs of the land. In the cancellation lawsuit, no one would be able to advance the money for the costs, while in the land acquisition, the government would advance the price under the Community Mortgage Program Law. The tenants or squatters would pay only an affordable amortization of P400 monthly for the next 25 years. In the end, we opted for the second and borrowed from the government a total of P12 million pesos.

 And this is how the journey began. We sat down with all the four fighting organizations and convinced them of the plan. All agreed but would not work together. The CMP law required, as the name implies, that it is the community who borrows from the government, not the individuals. The problem was these four organizations had overlapping memberships and claimed the same land.

Each week, I met all the leaders and officers and prayed and had meals with them. For one year, we talked, each time, during dinner, they would shout and insult each other. Our team listened to each ones side. We also argued, and pushed and bargained. Until finally, through persistent peacemaking, we made them sign an agreement to form into one organization only. God also blessed us when all the good leaders got elected into the new organization.

 Let me describe to you some scenes after that:

 Imagine running a complaints department in a large department store. That is what it feels running the office of the land acquisition program with 500 families. One typical case that would be repeated constantly was when an old mother would come and pay only P250 pesos instead of P400 because her son is sick or had some other problem. Now our bookkeeper is unskilled and inexperienced. Ideally, he could handle the books if all the figures coming in are the same, and not if we had to run receivables!

At the start, we had to do the survey of the boundaries of the land. Each person had to fork out at least P1,000 pesos for surveyor fee (the minimum wage then was P6,000 pesos). As anyone who had been a community organizer knows, people will not give you money unless they trust you. It took many months of going around house to house to convince them to pay up. And then the bad news comes. Those outside the land would be excluded, after they had already paid.

Onsite housing project also brings its own horrors. Offsite work is simpler and neater. You don’t have to do re-blocking of the houses and roads. But offsite is often a failure because it is costly to bring around the amenities and infrastructures to support the resettlement (water, electricity, school, jobs, etc.). Onsite is messier but easier in the long run. Just imagine though how many houses had to be sliced. And how many more refused to be sliced.

At the start, each family had to pay membership fee and it amounted to around P8,000 pesos. On the first day, we collected almost half a million, which we had to bury immediately in the ground. Sure enough, thieves came that night while we were sleeping and ransacked our parsonage.

Getting a loan also for land is like asking for a hole in the head. The people had to realize that when the get the title, it would not add to their finances, but would only mean they now have a debt of P400 a month. Considering that their monthly income is already tightly allocated, getting a P400 monthly loan without any benefit in exchange (except peace of mind), is very hard for them unless very good social preparations are done. But even then, they are never really ready. Besides, they can only get the actual title 25 years later, so they cannot use it as collateral for loan in a bank.

The worse nightmare for me was midway, we began to realize that at least, those at the bottom 10% would not be able to pay and would end up getting kicked out. Just imagine, a Christian community worker, seeking to help the poorest of the poor, kicking them out!

 The toll on my family also showed. Our community meetings often lasted till midnight and my family life suffered. Someone afterwards offered me a large amount of money to buy land for the poor and I gave it back. I did not have anymore stamina to work that many years for those long hours. Their journey continues up to now, more than 8 years have passed. I was there only for the first 5 years.

 In retrospect, would I encourage work on land rights for the poor? No. maybe for rural poor where land is a critical economic factor. Without land, the poor would have no means of production or livelihood. In the urban setting, like any urban areas in the world, land is not the critical factor. The owners of the land in Tokyo or New York do not necessarily control the economy. Business runs on capital (cold cash). Urban areas are major concentrations of capital. 65% of the Philippines’ money is in Manila. Almost all job opportunities are located in Manila. The urban poor do not need land. Land in the urban setting is not an asset until coupled with large capital. What the urban poor needs are jobs.

 The recent spate of railway construction in Manila is a palliative approach to the problem. It is a political manoeuver that does not seek to solve the problem but simply exploit it. Politicians want the concentration of votes in the slums which they could easily buy during elections. The railway only eases up the traffic, not the poverty. It helps those who have jobs. What Manila needs are good railways going out of the city, into the cheap and vast outlying countryside. This would immediately bring down the price of land in Manila.

Also, we have enough good laws already, what we need are better enforcement. The poor need a cheaper procedure for protecting their rights.