Introduction

The Manila Metropolitan Area is also a primate city. Since the Spanish colonial period, Manila, the capital of the Philippines, has been its centre of trade, economic and cultural development.

For the Philippines, government resources will never be sufficient to maintain a continuous subsidy for housing for low income families and there is a need for policy reinforcements especially in land acquisition and strategies to lower the cost of housing in order to make it accessible to the poor. Only 15 per cent of the population of Metro-Manila is estimated to be served by sewers or individual septic tanks. Some 1.8 million lack adequate water supplies, educational, community, health and sanitary services. Inadequate services such as the collection of domestic solid wastes means that garbage is dumped into canals and drains in the city, causing blockage and flooding.

Despite the fact that relocation sites were planned to rehouse hundreds of thousands of squatters, the sites themselves were ill-prepared, the promised facilities were not available and people had to make do with hastily constructed shelters. For many squatter households, relocation meant the uprooting of life in its entirety. These urban dwellers had to move from an environment that had become vital to themselves and their families, economically and socially. Squatters were usually brought to locations and sites outside of Manila far away from their workplaces, their established network of friends or relatives and work as well as business contacts. Their children had to leave their schools. People who earned extra income looking after infants and children had far fewer opportunities to earn such secondary incomes in the sites to which they had been relocated.

Research has shown that before removal to the relocation or resettlement sites, household heads as well as their spouses would usually work for a living as drivers of jeepneys (jeeps converted into taxis). Others worked on construction sites, as security guards, street vendors, scavengers, laundrywomen, maids and dressmakers. Many who could not find regular work of this kind would have to find casual work in the city and hence, had to live close to the central city areas in order to locate such work. Most would have to be able to live close to work also so that they could walk or at least keep commuting costs down and save on transport. Casual workers were even more badly affected by the moves.