The man obviously rued the order to vacate what he called his home for years.
But he had no choice. A soil erosion threatened to wipe out a small community where he lived, where about a dozen of similar houses where built.
It was near a creek down what used to be a hill. A big amount of rain last week had caused the soil to erode.
Several houses were destroyed by the erosion. He said he was lucky his house was only torn nearly half. He was ready to rebuild it, but then came the order to permanently vacate the place.
There was so much in the story that needed to be tackled in several perspectives in that three-minute insertion to a bigger news item that was the flooding and landslides which wrought havoc in several places in Metro Manila the past week.
There was no typhoon, only a relatively large amount of rain which the metropolis could no longer handle. That’s why we had Ondoy, and if nothing concrete is done to avert its repeat, Ondoy will happen again.
That man said he had paid P11,000 for that box of a house no bigger than three or four square meters. From whom had he bought it? He can no longer tell.
He has no choice but to follow the order to relocate. He didn’t want to. Besides, there was no assurance his new place would be as good as the one he was forced to leave.
There is a chance he’ll be back there soon. It’s where he makes a living, where he knew its people, where he finds his comfort zone.
These are the same reasons other informal settlers whose houses were demolished in the past insist on going back to where they once lived.
Most of them were no longer able to settle back in their old places, though. These have made way to newer, more modern, huge buildings which were made for malls and condominiums, private offices and government centers.
Stories like these repeat. The ugly images of demolitions, of people hurt and killed in defense of what they called their homes, they weave in and out of our subconscious. They make for news when there is no better news to print.
Recently, a P65-billion project by the Ayala Land Inc. in North Triangle came under the spotlight. The project is good news for a country desperately seeking more jobs, whatever jobs, to offer its people. For some, the project is like manna from heaven.
But for the displaced community of informal settlers, it is like death coming in the form of hammers and bulldozers. They initially fought with mud and rocks, but they could never match the forces supplied by their own government to support a private enterprise like ALI.
Like in other demolitions, they will have to go, too.
It is always government and private enterprise which win in this kind of battle.
The political and economic equations favor development based on government template, notwithstanding its political orientation, as displacements also happen Beijing as it happens in Manila.
Undoubtedly, the ALI’s Vertis North project in the 2.9-hectare property of the National Housing Authority (NHA) near the Ayala-owned Trinoma Mall, will help reshape Quezon City. According to its public relations pitch, it will generate jobs up to  35,000 for QC residents, as well as those from the nearby provinces of Bulacan and Pampanga, for the Ayala’s business product outsourcing (BPO) project. I have my reservations on BPOs, but that will do for now for a government searching for a stop-gap measure against discontent and possible revolution in a country where there is very limited production to balance its consumption of products.
It’s easier for government to quell small discontents in communities fighting displacement, but very little is done to ameliorate their status.
Informal settlers are being shooed away to places not yet habitable. It’s up to them to make it livable, perhaps in the manner they have transformed their old communities.
Metro Manila is also shrinking. Prime spaces are going up so fast that not even middle-income earners can afford to buy properties within the metropolis where they work.
It was only in the past two decades when real property developments tended to rise skyward, a rather late approach earlier taken by Hong Kong and Singapore to preserve their very precious lands.
Yet, we are looking at a continuously ballooning population in the big cities that will contribute to their decay if no effort would be put to use to solve its problems in waste management, water sourcing, power supply and transportation. Add to these what now seem like a perennial problem in flooding and Armageddon comes to mind.
We are moving outward in reverse. Government is sending out the unwanted (read: informal settlers) outside of Metro Manila while they fight for what little economic opportunities they see in the big cities.
Meantime, Metro Manila remains as the business hub of choice by the big capitalists bringing no end to their fight for the open spaces which no longer exist.