The City Council has called attention to the housing backlog in Dumaguete by refusing a request of a subdivision developer to reclassify some agricultural land into residential land so they could continue to build more homes.
The City Council noted that the subdivision developer has not allocated 20 percent of their previous subdivision projects to socialized housing.
Well, the subdivision developer claimed they had actually appropriated 20 percent of the land area for socialized housing — but not in Dumaguete. Instead, their socialized housing projects were built in Sagay, Negros Occidental and in Plaridel, Bulacan. The reason given by the developer was the high price of land in Dumaguete.
For now, that is not illegal. The law gives the developers the option of where to put the low-cost housing units.
The developer’s decision, of course, did not sit well with the City Council, which promptly issued a Resolution which, in effect, said no reclassification would be done unless this 20 percent socialized housing requirement would be complied with in Dumaguete.
There’s an economic boom in the City, fueled by the academe, business process outsourcing companies, and overseas remittances. That is why these housing developers are making huge profits converting agricultural land into subdivisions.
But there are also many others who have yet to benefit from this growth rate of, as some businessmen would say, more than 30 percent per annum.
The story highlights the need for more affordable housing projects in Dumaguete. If we do not pay attention to this need, we will soon have more informal settlers in our midst.
The most the City can do to ensure that this provision is complied with is to refrain from reclassifying agricultural land.
A better way to resolve this is for our Congressman to sponsor a law requiring that the socialized housing component of any subdivision should be built in the same locality where the subdivision is located.
Once this takes place, more low-income earners would have a better chance at living in a decent home. That is trickle-down economics in action.
