AFTER providing housing to more than 300 informal-settler families, the city government of San Juan will provide affordable housing to the teachers, policemen and those working in city hall through the Pag-IBIG-funded project F. Manalo Housing in Barangay Batis.
Councilor Vincent Pacheco of the Committee on Housing, Land and Urban Development, said Phase 2 of Mayor Guia Gomez’s housing project is now nearing completion.
“This housing project is one of the significant components of Mayor Guia Gomez’s 7 Ks Program which is Kalinga sa Pamilya,” Pacheco said in an interview with the BusinessMirror.
Pacheco added before the year ends, the beneficiaries would be able to occupy the projected two buildings with 10 floors per building.
“Mayor Guia Gomez believes it is very difficult for a mother or a family not to have a house to call their own,” he said.
He added that the city government’s employees are qualified to avail themselves of the project. He, however, could not give the exact number of beneficiaries during the interview.
Gomez said the in-city housing project of San Juan followed the completion of Saint Joseph Ville, in December 2015.
Both housing projects are part of the flagship projects of Gomez, who has been instrumental in pushing for several projects aimed at uplifting the lives of her constituents and upgrading the environment of the city, which envisions itself as a City of Excellence, a globally competitive and dynamic community of empowered residents.
Sen. Joseph Victor G. Ejercito believes “vertical socialized housing” is an alternative in providing safe homes for informal-settler families.
Ejercito, himself a former chief executive of the City of San Juan, said “LGUs and city mayors should be actively engaged in in-city housing because they know best which families should be prioritized for resettlement, how to identify and acquire the land where vertical socialized housing will be built.”
Ejercito, who chairs the Senate Committee on Urban Planning, Housing and Resettlement, added: “LGUs are also effective in overseeing project implementation in cooperation with the National Housing Authority.”
Ejercito had hoped the socialized housing program will be effectively implemented in the entire country just like how he did in his home city of San Juan.