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LACK of meaningful consultations with affected communities remains among the leading factors behind the challenges faced by families relocated under socialized housing programs, according to a recent report.

A study by the Philippine Resource Center for Inclusive Development (Inklusibo) urged government shelter agencies and private developers to have closer coordination with civil society organizations and local stakeholders to strengthen accountability and improve outcomes for low-income families.

They highlighted the need to pair housing assistance with broader social protection measures, including fair income verification systems, affordability safeguards and integration with livelihood, education and employment programs.

‘Without sustained assistance, these families risk falling into a cycle of displacement and deeper poverty,’ Inklusibo said. ‘With the right intervention and a genuinely participatory approach that centers on the poor.’

The organization cited in-city, high-rise, and mixed-income housing models-such as the Tondominium project-as suitable for densely populated urban areas where land is scarce.

These designs, it said, allow families to remain close to their jobs and essential services while incorporating disaster-resilient features and maintenance systems.

According to the report, larger units are also more responsive to the needs of low-income families, which often have more members.

‘As low-income families tend to be large, its 44-square-meter units are better suited to their needs than Vitas Katuparan’s 28-square-meter units,’ the group noted.

Mixed-income occupancy was likewise found to foster stronger support networks and expand economic opportunities for residents, though Inklusibo underscored that displaced and low-income families must remain the priority beneficiaries.

The group further gathered other recommendations from stakeholders, including mandatory initial inspections before turnover to address structural issues early and the creation of public spaces to promote social interaction.

Relocating entire communities together, allowing families to live near one another, and providing responsive administrative support were also cited as key measures for ensuring smoother adjustment.

Resident views

SOME residents welcomed high-rise housing for accommodating more families, but many still preferred low-rise structures, citing earthquake safety and limited building lifespan.

About 45 percent of respondents said they supported the relocation, noting better safety, privacy, and sanitation. They also credited larger units, solid partitions, and security features such as guards and CCTVs for improved living conditions.

Cleaner surroundings and on-site administrators also helped deter trespassing, theft, and other crimes.

Participants reported better health outcomes, attributing these to improved ventilation and sanitation. Some also hoped that similar relocation opportunities would be extended to families still living in condemned Vitas Katuparan buildings.

Meanwhile, 35 percent opposed the move and 20 percent were undecided, pointing to gaps in post-relocation aid, strict building rules, inadequate closed-circuit television monitors (CCTV), unsafe playgrounds, and perceived earthquake risks. Others raised maintenance issues, including unit defects and persistent leaks.

‘Water leaks from ceiling cracks caused by earthquakes are a prominent concern among those on higher floors. Some residents, commonly in corner units regardless of floor level, also experience water leaks from windows during strong rainstorms,’ the report said.

Cracks on the roof deck were also reported but remain unaddressed despite a city ordinance mandating priority repairs in common areas.

Affordability, however, emerged as the most pressing concern. ‘Four households were already evicted, and over half face eviction threats,’ the report said.

Monthly rent is P2,000 for households earning below P13,000, and P3,000 for those earning more.

Launched in February 2022, Tondominium is among the Manila City government’s high-rise housing projects under Ordinance 8730, which allows vertical developments on government-owned land for informal settler families.

The P1-billion project, built through the Manila Urban Settlements Office (MUSO), consists of two 15-storey towers with 336 units for former residents of Vitas Katuparan, one of several condemned structures identified by the National Housing Authority in 2020.

Housing Secretary Jose Ramon Aliling earlier said the government is recalibrating its socialized housing strategy to include horizontal or subdivision-style projects. His predecessor, Jose Rizalino Acuzar, had pushed vertical housing to maximize land use but acknowledged its higher planning and construction demands.

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Wednesday announced that the cancellation of the registration of the Duterte Youth party-list is now final and executory.

This follows the group’s failure to secure a temporary restraining order (TRO) from the Supreme Court to stop the poll body from implementing its ruling.

In its statement, the Comelec reiterated that the commission’s Second Division earlier declared Duterte Youth’s registration void ab initio for failing to comply with publication and hearing requirements.

‘With the issuance of the Certificate of Finality and Entry of Judgment, the Order of the Commission En Banc as to the cancellation of the party-list registration of Duterte Youth is now declared immediately executory,’ the Comelec said.

The poll body also cited other grounds for cancellation, including untruthful statements in the group’s petition, questions on the eligibility of its nominees, and the lack of genuine intent to represent the youth sector.

It further noted that Duterte Youth was linked to the National Youth Commission, had promoted unlawful means to advance its objectives, violated election laws and regulations, and filed its petition in a manner that placed the electoral process in disrepute.

Duterte Youth garnered 2.33 million votes in the May 2025 midterm elections-the second-highest among party-list groups-which would have entitled it to three seats in the House of Representatives had its registration not been canceled.

The poll body said it would proclaim the three new holders of the vacated seats on Thursday afternoon.

The Philippines, along with Indonesia and India, has the highest potential for decisive mangrove action in Asia, ranking 2nd next to Indonesia. However, in terms of financial capacity and investors’ confidence, it ranks below most Asian countries, falling 11th of 17th, a new regional report revealed.

The Regional Readiness Reports map regional trends, threats, as well as conservation and restoration potential, and show the far-reaching impacts of climate, biodiversity, and sustainable developments in nations with high mangrove cover.

Produced by the Global Mangrove Alliance and the Mangrove Breakthrough, the Regional Readiness Reports map regional trends, threats, as well as conservation and restoration potential, and show the far-reaching impacts for climate, biodiversity, and sustainable development in nations with high mangrove cover.

‘These reports answer the critical question of where and how we can most effectively accelerate mangrove action,’ said Irene Kingma, Wetlands International. ‘They point funders and decision-makers to opportunities and to places and partners ready to move.’

According to the Regional Readiness Reports, Asia is home to the largest areas of mangroves in the world, totaling 58,236 km2 distributed across 18 countries: Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Singapore, Timor-Leste, Taiwan, the Maldives and Japan. This is around 40% of the 150,000 km2 of mangroves remaining globally in 2020, according to Global Mangrove Watch.

The report said the Philippines has 230.78 km of restorable mangrove area, second only to Indonesia with 2,032 km. India is 3rd with 179 km.

In terms of financial stability and investor confidence, the Philippines ranked 11th while India is 6th, and Indonesia, 9th.

Topping Asian countries with the highest financial investor confidence is Singapore, followed by Japan and Malaysia.

‘Mangroves store up to four times more carbon than tropical rainforests, shield coastal communities from rising seas and storms, and provide vital habitat for over 340 threatened species. Yet, over 50% of their original extent has already been lost, and efforts to conserve and restore them remain severely underfunded,’ the report revealed.

To close this gap, Mangrove Breakthrough partners are mobilizing $4 billion in public, private, and philanthropic finance to halt mangrove loss, restore half of degraded mangroves, and double their protection by 2030. These Regional Reports translate its Finance Roadmap into tangible, high-impact investment opportunities across the three critical regions.

‘The Regional Readiness Reports are blueprints to help donors, financial institutions, governments and NGOs align their resources and commitments-advancing the Mangrove Breakthrough into its next phase, driving system-level change across target regions, and delivering tangible benefits for frontline coastal communities and ecosystems’, added Ignace Beguin, Director of the Mangrove Breakthrough.

The report noted that Asia is home to around 40% of the world’s remaining mangroves. With 3,927 km² of restorable mangroves, the region could deliver nearly half (47%) of the global Mangrove Breakthrough restoration target. Around 27% of mangroves in Asia are under some form of formal protection. Due to the globally significant mangrove area in Indonesia, doubling protection levels there would realize more than half of the Mangrove Breakthrough’s regional goal. Across Asia, conversion of mangrove forests to shrimp aquaculture ponds and agricultural plantations is the largest driver of loss, and resolving land tenure is the most common barrier to effective action.

In the Philippines, mangroves are recognized as highly protected nature-based solutions to climate change, the Climate Change Commission (CCC) said.

Several mechanisms aimed at the protection, preservation, and rehabilitation of Philippine mangrove systems were developed, including legislation and key documents.

Initial statistics reveal that the Philippines had 450,000 hectares of mangrove forests in 1920. By 1990, this decreased to 317,500 hectares, and in the most recent statistics, it decreased further to 311,400 hectares, the CCC said.

Despite the significant reduction of mangrove forest coverage over the past century, the Philippines remains home to numerous mangrove sites, citing the Ramsar Sites in various parts of the country, which are recognized for their international importance.

The avalanche of Congressional inquiries and whistleblower stories on the trillion-peso guni-guni flood control projects has awakened the citizenry to the massive corruption being committed by those in power. The people’s outrage was in full display on September 21, at the Luneta Park and the Edsa shrine.

Now, how can corruption, a never-ending and ever-growing problem in the Philippines, be tamed?

As it is, many in the September 21 rallies find the government’s response still weak and lacking in resolve? On Congressional inquiries: how can those involved in the flood scandals, the errant legislators in particular, be part of the committees to investigate the crime of corruption? And can the Independent Commission for Infrastructures undertake thorough cleansing of the graft-ridden infra development system when the commission is ad-hoc in character and limited to fact-finding work? How will these bodies address corruption issues linked to the highest officials of the land?

Is the President serious in pursuing a national cleansing of the graft-ridden infra and social spending processes? Does the President have the guts to ask family members and political allies involved in corruption to take a leave and allow a truly independent body with powers to hold accountable those guilty of corruption to be established, as suggested by Rep. Leila de Lima? Can FM Jr. be the bold reformer the nation is waiting for, or will he behave like his predecessors who barked loudly against corruption at the beginning, only to do nothing once the furor dies down? Is he prepared to break the ties that bind him to the KKK club-Kamag-anak, Kaklase, Kabarkada?

In the meantime, the nation is getting shocking revelations on how high-level corruption is being committed by criminal syndicates led by government officials, as Congressman Toby Tiangco put it. The gangs of plunderers have very deep connections in government and operate like Italian mafiosos. Based on PBBM’s list of top contractors, there are syndicates in different regions/districts of the country, some with a long history of plundering public funds under different administrations.

Who comprise a typical syndicate? They consist of the following:

First, you have the rent-seeking contractors eager to capture huge profits by making little or even no investments that result in substandard or non-existent projects. Of course, these contractors cannot bag juicy projects without the facilitating assistance of the get-rich-quick DPWH engineers and staff. And then to make these projects ‘move’ and get funded, these contractors and engineers have to secure the support of conniving officials in the executive branch, e.g., DBM, DOF, COA, etc. All these players are bound by some kind of an omerta code of silence.

But most importantly, the syndicates have godfathers, the ring leaders. They are the influential politicians who sit on top of the corruption ladder. They are the dynastic rulers of the land. They wield political power and shamelessly engage in primitive accumulation for the benefit of their families, clans and supporters. They tinker with the budgets, ingeniously shaping them to suit their plundering programs with the support of their chosen contractor firms, some of which they themselves set up or are run by family members and cronies.

With the illicit funds that they acquire, the plundering political elites perpetuate themselves and their families in power by spreading ‘ayuda’ to voters to get themselves elected with no hassle. The ayuda taken from the national budget (e.g., TUPAD, AKAP, etc.) or shaved from the DPWH and other government projects make them ‘popular’ overnight to dirt-poor voters. Thus, Partylists and dynastic congressmen do not even go to the trouble of drawing up comprehensive economic-political reform programs and conducting prolonged campaigns to win popular support. They simply go around distributing ‘ayuda’ one or two weeks before the elections.

In a number of congressional districts, the electoral contest is reduced to a battle of who could give the bigger ayuda, ayuda that could go as high as P15,000 or more per voter. The competition to get the voters’ interest based on the development vision and reform agenda of a candidate in a congressional district becomes meaningless. There are no healthy political debates on problems such as joblessness, landlessness and homelessness among the voting poor in a district and how the dynastic candidates plan to address them. In the 2025 elections, a dynastic political family in a Mindanao province was even reported to have promised the barangay captains that their barangays would receive numerous benefits, including a barangay vehicle, if they deliver zero votes to their opponents.

The foregoing dynastic way of buying votes is well known across the archipelago. And yet, the Comelec does not have the will or courage to correct vote buying. The Comelec simply asks concerned citizens to file verified and documented complaints instead of the Comelec itself, motu proprio, fielding agents to stop vote buying, which is usually conducted in an organized way in barangay halls across the country. The Comelec further erodes the credibility of the electoral results when it refuses to cooperate with the demand of IT experts to explain why the audited source code in the automated election system was not used and why there were millions of spoiled overvotes for partylists and senators.

Once in power, the dynastic political elite unabashedly use government resources not only to reward families and loyalists but also to place them in key government positions that enable them to control national and local spending and secure the license to exploit natural and other resources. They have also transformed the IMF-WB policy prescriptions of privatization and trade/investment liberalization as instruments to develop rent-seeking monopolies out of privatized public services (power, water, etc.) and liberalized trade systems. The clear outcomes of this governance arrangement are disempowerment of the poor and their communities and the deeper social and economic inequality at both local and national levels.

The dominant political dynastic families get themselves re-elected regularly even if some political reformers somehow succeed ‘sporadically and for short periods of time,’ as a German scholar Peter Kruizer noted (‘Mafia-style domination in the Philippines’, 2012). Comparing the country to Italy, Kruizer concluded that ‘Mafia-style domination is part and parcel of the democratic political process’ in the Philippines.

But is this real democracy? A government of the few for the few? An elite in perpetual control of the government through patronage politics, vote buying, business monopolies, etc.? They even have the Comelec as a virtual ally, a Comelec that is unable to explain creditably the non-use of the audited hash code in the 2025 automated elections, which elicited the remark of former DICT Undersecretary Elisio Rio that Philippine democracy has become a ‘farce.’

Given the malgovernance of the country and the large-scale plunder that the ruling political dynasties are committing, the political-economic system looks more and more like a mafia-run machinery managed by powerful syndicates. Breaking this dynastic rule, as mandated by the 1987 Constitution, is clearly a moral, economic and political necessity. To upend this rule is to unlock the country’s democratic potential to build a more just, inclusive and sustainable society.

AS the chant ‘Mga Corrupt, Ikulong na yan!’ reverberated during the Luneta and Mendiola anti-corruption rallies, street vendor Alvin Karingal was catapulted to social media fame because of his ‘ibaba ang presyo ng fishballs, kikiam, calamares at kwek-kwek’ video.

I already noticed Karingal in the Luneta rally while I was video documenting the rallyists, as he was marching with the contingents of the University of the Philippines.

The mass actions are closely tied to the flood control corruption scandal that revolves around the diversion of billions of public funds to a network of favored contractors, lawmakers, and officials tied to flood control projects over the past three years.

Despite the reported completion of 5,500 flood control projects, many are either substandard or entirely non-existent.

The anti-corruption rallies coincided with the Martial Law anniversary.

President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. signed Proclamation No. 1081 on September 21, 1972, marking the beginning of a 14-year period of dictatorial rule, which effectively lasted until he was exiled from the country on February 25, 1986.

Corruption under the Marcos dictatorial regime ranged from theft of foreign and military aid to the domestic system of crony capitalism.

Political, economic, and social conditions coalesced to create a volatile political environment in the early 1980s. As the crony-run corporations collapsed and Marcos’s associates fled abroad with their assets, the financial situation deteriorated. Continuous mass actions led to his eventual downfall in 1986.

Five decades later, corruption issues also plague the administration of his son, President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr.

The formal program in Mendiola ended at around 3:30 p.m. and organizers requested for a peaceful dispersal.

I was only a few meters away when violent clashes erupted as some masked individuals hurled stones, plastic bottles, sticks and Molotov cocktails at the police who stood as a barricade between the crowd and Malacañang.

The riots at Ayala Bridge, Recto, and Mendiola left scores of protesters and police injured, toppled steel posts, a motel ransacked and a trailer on fire at the foot of Ayala Bridge.

At least 216 were arrested following the riots, including 95 minors. Karingal was one of them.

The chant was simple, even absurd and funny to some as his call is just for cheaper street food. He was later identified as a person with mental health condition and a former mayoral candidate.

But for him, and others of similar economic status, it is not a joke. He has been an active rallyist, and a street vendor. He knows exactly how every peso is earned through sweat and struggle.

A post said: ‘This is how corruption shows itself in the daily lives of ordinary people. What others see as small change means survival for those who work tirelessly just to put food on the table. That money comes from long hours of work, tired bodies, and sacrifices.’

‘His call was not just about street food. It was about the everyday struggles of the poor, about dignity, and about justice. And I hope people realize that behind words like his is the truth about how deeply our system fails the poor.’

Kwek-kwek, fishball and kikiam are not exclusively ‘food of the poor,’ but rather a very affordable and popular Filipino street food, making them accessible to people from all economic backgrounds.

Their association with the poor might stem from their origins and widespread availability in the streets.

Filipino street food is the product of adversity. As a colonized country, expensive and high-quality meats were incredibly expensive and impossible to get, necessitating the usage of the animal’s less glamorous and less expensive components. These pieces have been converted into some of the most delicious and economical bites of food, demonstrating the adaptability and resourcefulness of Filipinos.

Corruption is not just a concept: it is felt in daily prices, in the cost of street food, in flooded streets that adversely affect small vendors’ sales, and in public funds diverted from basic services that keep communities afloat.

Karingal was pointing to inflation or the rising cost of basic goods. For his customers, who were ordinary people like him, even a one-peso increase has a big impact. He was asking for something simple, that street food should stay affordable for everyone.

Food itself is a political battlefield. Research group IBON said that involuntary hunger doubled under the Marcos Jr. administration due to its failure to ensure higher wages and low prices.

‘The rise in hunger is a wakeup call that many Filipinos are struggling on meager incomes and the high cost of living. This shows government’s rhetoric of economic gains and a robust jobs market is empty-just like the bellies of millions of hungry Filipinos.’

Peyups is the moniker of the University of the Philippines. Atty. Dennis R. Gorecho heads the seafarers’ division of the Sapalo Velez Bundang Bulilan law offices. For comments, e-mail info@sapalovelez.com, or call 0917-502580.