Will the creation of a full-fledged Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD)help solve the acute housing shortage in the country?
That’s the rationale behind the filing of two bills in the legislature. The Senate version consolidates six similar bills that wanted to address the nation’s housing needs in a rational way. The proposed bill seeks to deal with the problems of overcrowding, restrictions in unlocking land for human settlements, lack of an efficient transport system and the rising number of squatter communities.
Senate Bill 1578 consolidates the administrative functions of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council and the planning and regulatory functions of the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board. The department will act as the sole and main planning and policy-making, regulatory, program-coordination and performance-monitoring entity for all housing and urban-development concerns.
The creation of one housing department with one board is seen to pave the way for a comprehensive road map for housing and urban development.
Over at the House of Representatives, the Committee on Housing and Urban Development believes that Republic Act 7279, or the Urban Development Housing Act, has failed to solve the housing backlog in the country, which stood at 3 million in 1992. It estimates the housing needs of Filipinos to increase to 6.8 million before the Duterte administration bows out of office in 2022.
House Bill 677, therefore, seeks to establish the DHSUD that will adopt and implement a comprehensive and integrated national and local housing and urban-development program. It will also rationalize and coordinate the functions and powers of the National Home Mortgage Finance Corp., Home Guaranty Corp., Home Development Mutual Fund and the National Housing Authority.
The DHSUD will not only provide for housing but also “focus on building communities and habitats in both rural and urban areas.”
The new department shall act as the primary national government entity responsible for the management of housing, human settlement and urban development. It will not only deal with the physical element of housing but, likewise, provide the necessary link to community services and components, such as education, health, culture, welfare, recreation, food and nutrition.
First on the agenda of the DHSUD is to craft and adopt a national strategy to immediately address the provision of adequate and affordable housing to all Filipinos. As the sole entity for all housing, human-settlement and urban-development concerns, primarily focusing on the access to and the affordability of basic human needs, the DHSUD is an idea whose time has come.
While we’re glad that the first step in solving the housing problem will be taken with the creation of a separate department for housing, we don’t expect anything dramatic to happen in the next several years, or perhaps even until the end of the Duterte administration in 2022. The Department of Information and Communications Technology, for instance, has been in existence for nearly two years now, and we haven’t seen a big leap in our Information and communication technology infrastructure, with our Internet connection still the most expensive and the slowest in this part of the world. The DHSUD will need time to set up shop once the law is in place, but we doubt if it will be able to gain headway in convincing the national government to give up public land for affordable socialized housing.
Support for MSMEs
DO we have a conducive business environment that gives local investors enough incentive to keep their money at home?
The World Bank, for instance, comes up with an annual ease of doing business report where “getting credit” is one of the indicators. And analysts are saying that our ranking in this single indicator could jump by as much as 100 places if the legislature immediately passes the secured transactions systems bill.
This bill seeks to encourage more lending to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and agriculture, since it offers entrepreneurs opportunity to use movable collateral, such as inventory, receivables, crops, livestock and equipment, to back up their loan applications.
At present, lenders accept only real estate as collateral. Thus, production by family household businesses is constrained by lack of funding.
The bill, once enacted into law, will develop a professional, regulated warehousing industry, which issues receipts that can be used as collateral by lenders and can be traded by investors and industry players.
It will also develop an automated movable collateral registry wherein announcements and information on transfers and pledges of collateral can be made and accessed by participants.
Moreover, it will develop the backbone of an efficient commodities market that will stabilize prices and expand transactions.
The Department of Finance is pushing for the immediate passage of the bill, as it believes that it would lead to a dramatic increase in the number of MSMEs. In China, for instance, lending to MSMEs increased by 50 percent to 100 percent, with $3.58 trillion in funds lent out in four years after the reform. Movable collateral is now also accepted for commercial lending in Vietnam.
The important thing now is for the legislature to approve the bill. If signed into law by President Duterte, we could similarly give a big boost to MSMEs and the agricultural sector and surpass our current GDP growth levels to as much as 7 percent to 8 percent, or even more.
E-mail: ernhil@yahoo.com