The bill aims to help families living in hazardous areas or those rendered homeless by calamities to avail themselves of safe and decent shelter.
House Bill (HB) 455 or The Rental Housing Subsidy Program Act as proposed by Rep. Pulong, Benguet Rep. Eric Yap and ACT-CIS Partylist Rep. Edvic Yap also covers informal settler families (ISFs) who do not have legal claims to the lots or houses they occupy.
Rep. Pulong emphasized the pressing need for Congress to pass the said legislation, particularly because tens of thousands of people are still being displaced due to strong typhoons and other natural disasters.
HB 455 has been consolidated by the House Committee on Housing and Urban Development with 18 other bills that also aim to provide rental subsidies to ISFs. The recommendations of the House Committee on Appropriations have already been incorporated into the substitute bill.
The bill aims to further consolidate and strengthen the rental and financial assistance program of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (DHSUD).
Under the said bill, the rental subsidy will be determined by the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD) and the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), taking into consideration the prevailing minimum wage and rental rates per region.
It is also stated in the bill that financial aid will continue until the ISFs have been resettled to permanent housing projects constructed by the government.
“People forced to squat on private property because of poverty, those living in danger areas, and those who lost their homes due to strong typhoons and other calamities or because they have been affected by public infrastructure projects should be given the chance to live in humane, decent conditions while waiting to be transferred to their permanent housing sites,” Rep. Pulong said.
To be eligible for the said rental subsidy, ISFs must not move or relocate back to the area where they originally lived unless authorized by the authorities. and they must pay the lessor the part of the rent not covered by the subsidy.
The measure provides that the rental subsidy shall not exceed the actual rent, provided that DHSUD and NEDA may review such subsidy at any time, but not more often than once every two years, depending on prevailing economic conditions.
The proposed Rental Housing Subsidy Program Act was among the priority bills of former President Rodrigo Duterte, which was already approved by the House during the previous Congress.
The bill also cited the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA’s) latest available data that there are about 4.5 million Filipinos who are homeless, of which 3 million are found in Metro Manila, and that among the main causes of homelessness are poverty, domestic violence, human trafficking, and natural disasters.
“Given the loss of livelihood of many Filipinos resulting from the economic shock of the recent pandemic and the devastation wrought by strong typhoons that have rendered hundreds of thousands homeless, these numbers reported by the PSA are expected to rise,” Rep. Pulong said.
He also said that government housing projects take time to build.
“We cannot just neglect the plight of our homeless countrymen and allow them to continue to suffer while they wait to be resettled,” he said.
