Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
MEDIA ADVISORY: Forum on Right to Adequate Housing
Attention: News Editor, News Desk, Reporters and Photojournalists
MEDIA ADVISORY
Forum on Right to Adequate Housing
It is our distinct honor to invite you to attend a forum on the Shadow Report on Housing Rights sent to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR) and the Concluding Observations of the Committee on the compliance of the Philippine government on the right to adequate housing.
Commission on Human Rights Chairperson Atty. Leila de Lima will be one of the main speakers. During the morning session, Chairperson de Lima will share her reflections on the Shadow Report process and the UN’s remarks.
Other resource persons are coming from NGOs such as Sentro ng Alternatibong Lingap Panligal (SALIGAN), John J. Carroll Institute on Church and Social Issues (JJCICSI), Foundation for the Development of the Urban Poor (FDUP) and Urban Poor Associates (UPA).
The speakers will share their thoughts on the Shadow Report; Legal Issues; Overview of the Housing Situation; Housing Finance and the Community Mortgage Program; Evictions; Relocation and Proclamations; and the Concluding Remarks made by the UNCESCR.
The forum will be held tomorrow, March 10 (Tuesday), at the Audio Visual Room of the Social Development Complex, Ateneo de Manila University. It will begin at 9:00 AM and end at 3:30 PM. A modest lunch will be served.
Various government agencies, people’s organizations and civil society groups are invited to attend the forum. We hope to see you there.
Date: March 10, 2008 (Tuesday) / 9:00 AM - 3:30 PM
Venue: Audio Visual Room, Social Development Complex, Ateneo de Manila University, Loyola Heights, Quezon City
MEDIA ADVISORY
Forum on Right to Adequate Housing
It is our distinct honor to invite you to attend a forum on the Shadow Report on Housing Rights sent to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR) and the Concluding Observations of the Committee on the compliance of the Philippine government on the right to adequate housing.
Commission on Human Rights Chairperson Atty. Leila de Lima will be one of the main speakers. During the morning session, Chairperson de Lima will share her reflections on the Shadow Report process and the UN’s remarks.
Other resource persons are coming from NGOs such as Sentro ng Alternatibong Lingap Panligal (SALIGAN), John J. Carroll Institute on Church and Social Issues (JJCICSI), Foundation for the Development of the Urban Poor (FDUP) and Urban Poor Associates (UPA).
The speakers will share their thoughts on the Shadow Report; Legal Issues; Overview of the Housing Situation; Housing Finance and the Community Mortgage Program; Evictions; Relocation and Proclamations; and the Concluding Remarks made by the UNCESCR.
The forum will be held tomorrow, March 10 (Tuesday), at the Audio Visual Room of the Social Development Complex, Ateneo de Manila University. It will begin at 9:00 AM and end at 3:30 PM. A modest lunch will be served.
Various government agencies, people’s organizations and civil society groups are invited to attend the forum. We hope to see you there.
Date: March 10, 2008 (Tuesday) / 9:00 AM - 3:30 PM
Venue: Audio Visual Room, Social Development Complex, Ateneo de Manila University, Loyola Heights, Quezon City
Amputations and evictions
Commentary : Amputations and evictions
By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: March 09, 2009
METRO Manila is going to see more and more evictions in the future as two powerful forces collide over land. On one side are urban poor families seeking a place to live. On the other side are groups demanding infrastructure, business centers, luxury housing, beautification, a clean environment, parks, recreation centers and malls. Between 1996 and 2008, some 85,000 families were evicted in Metro Manila. The numbers will increase.
Evictions are like physical amputation; they are traumatic events that tear apart a person’s world. There are no good amputations, and there are no good evictions. The most people can hope for in the case of amputation is good medical care and a helpful prosthetic. The hope in evictions is for the humane and just care promised by the Constitution (Article XIII, Section 28) and a decent relocation. They never make up for the lost limb or home.
As a way of making evictions palatable, the Charter of the Urban Poor asks that before infrastructure is approved for funding it must be studied in a public transparent fashion to make sure it truly serves the common good and not the narrow interests of a few powerful persons, and that the housing rights of the poor are ensured.
Is, for example, the extension of the C-5 from Old Balara to the North Luzon Expressway so intrinsic to the common good that 30,000 families have to be evicted? Are there no alternate ways to speed up traffic? If it is necessary, can the number of families evicted be limited by passing the road through the Capitol Hills Golf Course and not through the densely crowded urban poor areas of the University of the Philippines? Are there plans for quality relocation? Does the government have the P4.5 billion cost of relocating 30,000 families (NHA allots P150,000 for every relocated family)?
If the answer to any of the questions is negative, the infrastructure should be rejected or at least reworked.
The clean-up of Manila Bay and the river systems feeding into it, which was ordered by the Supreme Court recently, is another example. As soon as the decision was made public, some government agencies targeted the 70,000 families living along the banks of the waterways as the culprits and planned their eviction.
A public examination of the project would reveal that the main causes of pollution in the waters are the industries along the banks and the human waste of a million toilets flowing into the rivers and esteros. The major polluters are not the urban poor who cause only a small fraction of pollution, which can be controlled as Amelita Ramos showed in her Clean and Green Program. Those who want to clean up the waterways should begin with human waste treatment plants and disciplinary measures for industry. To do that, very few poor families have to be moved. Relocation of the 70,000 families will cost up to P10.5 billion. If there is no funding for relocation which is a basic human right, there should be no evictions.
The NorthRail-SouthRail project is the champion example for the need to examine proposed infrastructure publicly and intensely before committing funds. The project is now six years old. Billions of pesos have been spent. Some 49,000 families (as of October 2008) were evicted and relocated. In return for all this there is a 125-kilometer gray scar of crushed concrete running from Clark Field to Calamba, Laguna. Maybe, like the Great Wall of China, it is visible from space. In the North not a shovelful of earth has been moved. In the South some old tracks have been replaced with new ones, but there is no sign they are for the modern high speed trains that were once envisioned, which required a 30-meter wide right of way. The government has refused to put new money into the NorthRail (Business World, February 23).
It’s not just errors in implementation. Some planners say the NorthRail should have gone East of Mt. Arayat into Nueva Ecija and the provinces there where a train would have made great sense in carrying farm produce to market and opening up areas for development. On the West side of Arayat the train wasn’t really needed. The West Side is already developed. The choice of going West of Arayat only served to enhance the value of properties of some powerful persons, the planner said.
Finally, is there any need to evict poor people for the Metro Gwapo Program? It doesn’t attract investment: among all the reasons given by investors for the lack of investment in the Philippines, beautification is never mentioned. Far ahead in investor’s concerns are corruption, inadequate infrastructure, high costs of electric power and similar reasons. Investors don’t care if there are poor people living under bridges.
If the urban poor community, the Church and other civil society leaders see the government is doing its best to limit evictions and spend government money wisely for its infrastructure, there will be more willingness to accept some evictions. Otherwise it will be confrontation pure and simple.
Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.
©Copyright 2001-2009 INQUIRER.net, An Inquirer Company
By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: March 09, 2009
METRO Manila is going to see more and more evictions in the future as two powerful forces collide over land. On one side are urban poor families seeking a place to live. On the other side are groups demanding infrastructure, business centers, luxury housing, beautification, a clean environment, parks, recreation centers and malls. Between 1996 and 2008, some 85,000 families were evicted in Metro Manila. The numbers will increase.
Evictions are like physical amputation; they are traumatic events that tear apart a person’s world. There are no good amputations, and there are no good evictions. The most people can hope for in the case of amputation is good medical care and a helpful prosthetic. The hope in evictions is for the humane and just care promised by the Constitution (Article XIII, Section 28) and a decent relocation. They never make up for the lost limb or home.
As a way of making evictions palatable, the Charter of the Urban Poor asks that before infrastructure is approved for funding it must be studied in a public transparent fashion to make sure it truly serves the common good and not the narrow interests of a few powerful persons, and that the housing rights of the poor are ensured.
Is, for example, the extension of the C-5 from Old Balara to the North Luzon Expressway so intrinsic to the common good that 30,000 families have to be evicted? Are there no alternate ways to speed up traffic? If it is necessary, can the number of families evicted be limited by passing the road through the Capitol Hills Golf Course and not through the densely crowded urban poor areas of the University of the Philippines? Are there plans for quality relocation? Does the government have the P4.5 billion cost of relocating 30,000 families (NHA allots P150,000 for every relocated family)?
If the answer to any of the questions is negative, the infrastructure should be rejected or at least reworked.
The clean-up of Manila Bay and the river systems feeding into it, which was ordered by the Supreme Court recently, is another example. As soon as the decision was made public, some government agencies targeted the 70,000 families living along the banks of the waterways as the culprits and planned their eviction.
A public examination of the project would reveal that the main causes of pollution in the waters are the industries along the banks and the human waste of a million toilets flowing into the rivers and esteros. The major polluters are not the urban poor who cause only a small fraction of pollution, which can be controlled as Amelita Ramos showed in her Clean and Green Program. Those who want to clean up the waterways should begin with human waste treatment plants and disciplinary measures for industry. To do that, very few poor families have to be moved. Relocation of the 70,000 families will cost up to P10.5 billion. If there is no funding for relocation which is a basic human right, there should be no evictions.
The NorthRail-SouthRail project is the champion example for the need to examine proposed infrastructure publicly and intensely before committing funds. The project is now six years old. Billions of pesos have been spent. Some 49,000 families (as of October 2008) were evicted and relocated. In return for all this there is a 125-kilometer gray scar of crushed concrete running from Clark Field to Calamba, Laguna. Maybe, like the Great Wall of China, it is visible from space. In the North not a shovelful of earth has been moved. In the South some old tracks have been replaced with new ones, but there is no sign they are for the modern high speed trains that were once envisioned, which required a 30-meter wide right of way. The government has refused to put new money into the NorthRail (Business World, February 23).
It’s not just errors in implementation. Some planners say the NorthRail should have gone East of Mt. Arayat into Nueva Ecija and the provinces there where a train would have made great sense in carrying farm produce to market and opening up areas for development. On the West side of Arayat the train wasn’t really needed. The West Side is already developed. The choice of going West of Arayat only served to enhance the value of properties of some powerful persons, the planner said.
Finally, is there any need to evict poor people for the Metro Gwapo Program? It doesn’t attract investment: among all the reasons given by investors for the lack of investment in the Philippines, beautification is never mentioned. Far ahead in investor’s concerns are corruption, inadequate infrastructure, high costs of electric power and similar reasons. Investors don’t care if there are poor people living under bridges.
If the urban poor community, the Church and other civil society leaders see the government is doing its best to limit evictions and spend government money wisely for its infrastructure, there will be more willingness to accept some evictions. Otherwise it will be confrontation pure and simple.
Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.
©Copyright 2001-2009 INQUIRER.net, An Inquirer Company
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
How to win an election
Commentary : How to win an election
By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: February 16, 2009
AT a forum last week of the National Institute for Policy Studies, an American visitor who worked in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign shared insights about the campaign. He said the spirit of the whole campaign was based on community organizing (CO). He reminded people that Obama was a great admirer of the late Saul Alinsky, the father of modern urban organizing, and that Obama himself had served for three years after college as a community organizer in a small organization that traced its roots to Alinsky.
The visitor, Jo Hansen, moved on to other topics, but some of us who work in community organizing decided to look into the matter. How did CO elect a president? Can the CO approach help elect a president here?
In Iowa, the first of the primaries, and arguably the most important one for a relatively unknown candidate, Obama and his people set up an entirely new campaign structure. They ignored the existing Democratic Party structure (maybe they felt it already leaned toward Hillary Clinton or John Edwards) and built their own organization from the neighborhood level up, the bottom-up approach. This is what COs are supposed to do when they enter a community where the leadership structure is not pro poor.
Obama’s team recruited the best of the people who came to their campaign office to volunteer. They were from all types of neighborhoods, rich, middle-income and poor, but they all knew everything about their own neighborhoods and they were full of energy. None of them was connected to the regular Democratic Party structure. The Obama team gave the volunteers room to act as they thought best; they appointed as supervisors those neighborhood volunteers who worked the hardest and showed the most ingenuity. The whole structure from bottom to top was informal and personal. In the end the volunteers outworked the veterans of the other candidates.
Obama got far more money from ordinary Americans than any other candidate, because he made special efforts to ask them to help. In the end he had money in small amounts from 2.5 million people. Each of these donors became in some ways a campaign worker as donors always do: they want to make sure their money isn’t wasted. Imagine 2.5 million volunteer campaigners. CO has always worked best when it gets the money for its activities from the people.
Hansen discussed the sources of Obama’s campaign platform. He said the candidate felt it was the essence of democracy to find out what the people wanted and then make it part of his platform. There is nothing wrong in basing one’s actions on what polls tell a candidate the people want. As Obama went along, he found the demand for change was the overriding wish of the people, so that became the motif: “Change. Yes we can.” CO regularly gets its issues from the people. The alternative to such an approach is to come to the people with a platform entirely worked out in advance by a party or the powerful or some technocrats.
Finally Obama paid poor people who took a day off from work to help him. He had more poor people working for him than anyone else.
Can these emphases of Obama and community organizing help a candidate win here in 2010? The essential thing, according to Hansen, is that the candidate must be able to make the big majority of people, who in the Philippines are poor or what can be called near-poor, believe the candidate cares what happens to them and shares their values. To share their values and care for the poor and near-poor, the “D” and “E” categories of the pollsters, the candidate must get to know them as well as Obama did in his three years in Chicago’s slums. He or she must visit the poor, learn their issues, talk about those issues and champion those issues or demands.
The candidate who travels this path will be outside the existing party structures, and will have to put together from the bottom up his or her own campaign structure as Obama did in Iowa. The candidate, like Obama, should pick the best people outside the existing political structures, people from all income levels but mostly from the poor and near-poor. The candidate should give them freedom and exploit their ingenuity, let them be themselves, give them room, and let them be creative.
He or she would do well to seek the money needed from the poor and near-poor and from well-off people who believe in reform as Obama did. In this regard Hansen downplayed the value of TV and other costly campaigning techniques. The biggest influence on a voter in the United States is a person’s peers, he said, not TV or the press. In the Philippines it’s family and church (or mosque and temple), according to an Ateneo de Manila Institute of Philippine Culture study of influences on voters in the 2001 election. This means, it seems, that the candidate must early on convince core groups of the poor and near-poor and reformers, and the Church and other religious leaders, that he or she really shares their values and is deeply concerned about their welfare. The campaign will only succeed if the candidate truly does share those values and concerns. If the candidate can do this, the message will spread. Witness the success of Corazon Aquino in 1986.
CO and the form of campaigning Obama championed are good examples of democracy in action. It could work here.
Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His e-mail address is upa@pldtdsl.net.
©Copyright 2001-2009 INQUIRER.net, An Inquirer Company
By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: February 16, 2009
AT a forum last week of the National Institute for Policy Studies, an American visitor who worked in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign shared insights about the campaign. He said the spirit of the whole campaign was based on community organizing (CO). He reminded people that Obama was a great admirer of the late Saul Alinsky, the father of modern urban organizing, and that Obama himself had served for three years after college as a community organizer in a small organization that traced its roots to Alinsky.
The visitor, Jo Hansen, moved on to other topics, but some of us who work in community organizing decided to look into the matter. How did CO elect a president? Can the CO approach help elect a president here?
In Iowa, the first of the primaries, and arguably the most important one for a relatively unknown candidate, Obama and his people set up an entirely new campaign structure. They ignored the existing Democratic Party structure (maybe they felt it already leaned toward Hillary Clinton or John Edwards) and built their own organization from the neighborhood level up, the bottom-up approach. This is what COs are supposed to do when they enter a community where the leadership structure is not pro poor.
Obama’s team recruited the best of the people who came to their campaign office to volunteer. They were from all types of neighborhoods, rich, middle-income and poor, but they all knew everything about their own neighborhoods and they were full of energy. None of them was connected to the regular Democratic Party structure. The Obama team gave the volunteers room to act as they thought best; they appointed as supervisors those neighborhood volunteers who worked the hardest and showed the most ingenuity. The whole structure from bottom to top was informal and personal. In the end the volunteers outworked the veterans of the other candidates.
Obama got far more money from ordinary Americans than any other candidate, because he made special efforts to ask them to help. In the end he had money in small amounts from 2.5 million people. Each of these donors became in some ways a campaign worker as donors always do: they want to make sure their money isn’t wasted. Imagine 2.5 million volunteer campaigners. CO has always worked best when it gets the money for its activities from the people.
Hansen discussed the sources of Obama’s campaign platform. He said the candidate felt it was the essence of democracy to find out what the people wanted and then make it part of his platform. There is nothing wrong in basing one’s actions on what polls tell a candidate the people want. As Obama went along, he found the demand for change was the overriding wish of the people, so that became the motif: “Change. Yes we can.” CO regularly gets its issues from the people. The alternative to such an approach is to come to the people with a platform entirely worked out in advance by a party or the powerful or some technocrats.
Finally Obama paid poor people who took a day off from work to help him. He had more poor people working for him than anyone else.
Can these emphases of Obama and community organizing help a candidate win here in 2010? The essential thing, according to Hansen, is that the candidate must be able to make the big majority of people, who in the Philippines are poor or what can be called near-poor, believe the candidate cares what happens to them and shares their values. To share their values and care for the poor and near-poor, the “D” and “E” categories of the pollsters, the candidate must get to know them as well as Obama did in his three years in Chicago’s slums. He or she must visit the poor, learn their issues, talk about those issues and champion those issues or demands.
The candidate who travels this path will be outside the existing party structures, and will have to put together from the bottom up his or her own campaign structure as Obama did in Iowa. The candidate, like Obama, should pick the best people outside the existing political structures, people from all income levels but mostly from the poor and near-poor. The candidate should give them freedom and exploit their ingenuity, let them be themselves, give them room, and let them be creative.
He or she would do well to seek the money needed from the poor and near-poor and from well-off people who believe in reform as Obama did. In this regard Hansen downplayed the value of TV and other costly campaigning techniques. The biggest influence on a voter in the United States is a person’s peers, he said, not TV or the press. In the Philippines it’s family and church (or mosque and temple), according to an Ateneo de Manila Institute of Philippine Culture study of influences on voters in the 2001 election. This means, it seems, that the candidate must early on convince core groups of the poor and near-poor and reformers, and the Church and other religious leaders, that he or she really shares their values and is deeply concerned about their welfare. The campaign will only succeed if the candidate truly does share those values and concerns. If the candidate can do this, the message will spread. Witness the success of Corazon Aquino in 1986.
CO and the form of campaigning Obama championed are good examples of democracy in action. It could work here.
Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His e-mail address is upa@pldtdsl.net.
©Copyright 2001-2009 INQUIRER.net, An Inquirer Company
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