My company is involved in a mixed-use housing finance project, and some of the units will be offered as tax credit units. I am attending a training, to understand how the program will be run, from the financial side, to the operations to the all-important compliance monitoring, understanding what to look for during compliance audits and whose rule to follow – the grant, agreement, State rules, or the Federal rules. There are no perfect programs and there are no perfect clients in the program. That’s why these programs are heavy on compliance.

The bottom line is properly managing and executing the program, which is directed at low-income families, in compliance with state and federal statutes. And if it is, private investors could very well expect their tax credits, on time.

There is a certain part of what I do in my professional work that I enjoy. It’s that combination of carefully threading the fine line of delivering smiles to private investors at the same time meeting the states commitments in public housing as part of its social responsibility. These are two opposite poles, for-profit and non-profit. It’s private capital in affordable housing. This is part of what we do here, in the United States, with a developed market, whose provision for housing finance has expanded greatly over the years.

In fact, to this day, there is still a relatively healthy financial market competition in the low-income housing market despite the blood generated by the sub-prime crisis, because low-income housing investment is still considered by some in the private market as a highly profitable venture, that is, if the risks can be priced and managed.

Unlike in Quezon City, we are not creating a central business district. We are sensitively focused to our mission, providing affordable housing to low-income families and expect business in the neighborhood to grow. That’s the idea.

My email flickered. Avoid EDSA, it says. Houses of those families living in Sitio, San Roque in Barangay Pagasa were being demolished. The violence spread in some parts of EDSA. Accordingly, the demolition teams were about to tear down shanties when residents resisted and refused them to go near their houses.

It’s a scene that is all too familiar. We have seen this before. This has been repeated over and over. The demolition team armed with mallet, pickaxe and crowbars. The residents armed with stones and tears, facing broken promises and wrecked future from heartless and user politicians and an agency whose mission and vision are dysfunctionally irreconcilable with its action.

Change the date, change the location, change the administration. The violent drama is the same. It seemed to me that the agency that is supposed to manage a just and equitable relocation is stuck to the old habits of eviction. Was it by choice? Was NHA for display? Why are the politicians who got elected to continue to be anti-poor? Prove me wrong please!

But there was hope then, right? Noynoy Aquino promised us change. Update your list. This could very well be another bulleted point of things that will not change.

Meanwhile, the National Housing Authority’s mission and vision is commendable. If that’s not enough, their corporate objective punctuates their reason for being.

Their mission is to provide responsive housing programs primarily to homeless low-income families with access to social services and economic opportunities with excellence while ensuring corporate viability.

Their vision is a viable and self-sustaining corporate institution committed to provide homes to low-income and homeless Filipino families and contribute to the improvement of the quality of life of our beneficiaries.

And their corporate objective is to provide and maintain adequate housing for the greatest possible number of people, to undertake housing development, resettlement or other activities that would enhance the provision of housing to very Filipino and to harness and promote private participation in housing ventures in terms of capital expenditures, land, expertise, financing and other facilities for the sustained growth of the housing industry.

Let’s back up…

…to harness and promote private participation in housing ventures in terms of capital expenditures, land, expertise, financing and other facilities for the sustained growth of the housing industry.

That’s your Ayala participation folks, with the blessings of the QC government and a nod by the World Bank. Will there be low-income housing units in this planned central business district? I doubt. According to the email:

The NHA (which owns the said property) and Ayala Land Inc. in coordination with Quezon City local government plans to build a P22 billion project to utilize the 29.1 hectares of North Triangle aimed to develop into a central business and commercial district. World Bank calls the project “as the center of gravity of economic developments in Metro Manila in the coming years.”

I don’t think I’m missing something with NHA’s partnership with Ayala in terms of NHA’s mission to provide responsive housing to low-income families, sending these families 23 kms away for a meager P6,000 to start a new life in a community which we have no idea if basic facilities were sufficiently reasonable for families to move.

If I have to rely on the news, the story is very clear. The focus of the deal is not towards serving the needs of low-income families. Rather, it’s for big business!

Meanwhile, our training just got finished. The development project will soon be completed. And while I find satisfaction when we finally deliver the units for occupancy, I think about these people in Quezon City. These are the low-income families that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in Quezon City. And NHA, from what we have seen today, looked like a useless agency for low-income families.

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reynz is one Uragon and a Filipino-American, has many years of public accounting & auditing, broadcast investments, housing tax credits and equity investments as his background. Based in the US, he maintains his personal and humor blog at reyna elena dot com. A graduate of Aquinas U, he went to GWU and Temple U in the United States.