Though a catastrophe can be a chance to start fresh, the destruction of physical habitat does not wipe out the legal habitat, nor the economic or power structures, and all these render the business of redevelopment enormously complicated, as profiled in this downbeat article from the New York Times (December 14, 2013), as supplemented by a more insightful piece from Quartz, November 21, 2013; blue font):
Tacloban, Philippines, immediately after the typhoon
Land Disputes Slow Recovery in Philippines
Tacloban, the Philippines — A mile offshore from this typhoon-wrecked city lies a postcard-perfect tropical islet fringed with golden sand beaches and topped with a mansion and swimming pool: the private island of one of this country’s most powerful families, the Romualdez clan of the former first lady, Imelda Marcos.
Tacloban_staff_quarters
The staff quarters at a mansion in Tacloban that once held Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection.
Often former colonies have a landed aristocracy of families whose power and business and land claims are all braided together, going back decades if not centuries, and creating a natural oligarchy, the uncoordinated but naturally harmonic self-interest of which can perpetuate poverty. (It has also been so in Haiti for centuries.)
Land disputes at this settlement and similar shantytowns up and down the coast are among the many reasons the recovery effort here is faltering. The typhoon destroyed or severely damaged the homes of four million people — more than twice as many as those left homeless by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Virtually no new permanent houses are being built yet, as the local and national government wrangle about which areas are too vulnerable to storm surges to be rebuilt.
And who gets the free money that the world is offering.
The Romualdez family has owned the shoreline property for generations, since before Gen. Douglas MacArthur chose the southern outskirts of Tacloban in 1944 for the American invasion that began the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese rule.
A man who knew how to construct a photo-op: General Douglas MacArthur landing in the Leyte Gulf
The American military quickly built an airport and other facilities that helped transform what had been a college town and provincial capital into the fast-growing economic hub of the east-central Philippines.
The largesse of Mrs. Marcos and her husband, Ferdinand, during his two decades as the country’s autocratic leader also enriched the city and won Mrs. Marcos and her family a loyal following here.
Up grows a colony of informal tenure, which is tolerable so long as there is no built environment, because you can extract the value through rents. But building verticality changes the land-use economics and hence changes the oligarchy’s responses.
Facing much bigger political challenges during the chaotic last days of Marcos rule in the 1980s, the Romualdez family did little as squatters began moving in large numbers onto the sandy grasslands at the end of Tacloban’s airport runway.
Thus there has been long-standing adverse possession, and a de facto entitlement to security of (miserable) tenure.
Going home … if it still exists
As the city continued to boom — reaching 235,000 permanent residents before the typhoon, plus a similar number of students, migrant workers and other temporary residents — the family chose not to risk a confrontation by trying to evict anyone. Like those in other parts of the country where large numbers of former farmers and fishermen have poured into cities, vote-conscious politicians and the police have been reluctant to push out squatters, who register in large numbers to vote.
Because votes are political equity, politics can act as a check on both law and economic clout.
Congressman Martin Romualdez, who has played a leading role in the family’s discussions over the years about what to do with the site, said forcing people out would not have been “politically correct,” nor necessary, given the family’s many holdings in real estate and mining.
The non-suffering Martin Romualdez
After the typhoon, the squatters and the ruling family are once again at odds.
Facing the island are the devastated remains of what used to be the city’s most densely populated squatter settlement, a flattened jumble of broken boards and twisted sheets of corrugated steel on land also owned by the family.
The cost of informality: Tacloban after Typhoon Haiyan
An estimated 1,000 people in this settlement alone drowned a month ago when Typhoon Haiyan sent a tsunami-like storm surge rushing across the peninsula, obliterating the spindly homes in its path.
Now the Romualdez family, which has dominated city politics for decades, is locked in a battle with the squatters, trying to block rebuilding on the site.
Before the typhoon, the Romualdezes tolerated the informal housing, because the land had minimal value and the laborers could pay a minimal rent, so landownership was an economic proposition even with minimal landowner land-improvement effort.
Benjamin ‘Kokoy’ Romualdez, who recently died at 81
That equation changes with the arrival of the aid tsunami, because now there is free money available for rebuilding. To whom should that money belong? And if it’s used to improve land or build homes, who gains the benefit of the increased land value?
The standoff over the roughly six-acre strip of land owned by the Romualdez family is particularly fraught, emblematic of troubles that have plagued the Philippines for decades: an unequal distribution of property that keeps many mired in poverty, together with a degree of lawlessness and political expediency that allows the poor to settle on land that is not legally theirs. An estimated one-third of Tacloban’s residents are squatting on other people’s land.
There is only one solution to massive land irresolution: Use expropriation/ eminent domain to take the land and give it to the poor, but then compensate the rich with the fair market value of the impaired land use.
The landowning aristocracy includes not only Mrs. Marcos’s clan — Romualdez was her maiden name — but also the family of the president, Benigno S. Aquino III, which has begun to parcel out rural land to more than 6,000 tenant farmers under a court order.
The latest Aquino president
If it is not an aristocracy, the Philippines certainly has its powerful and well-connected families who pass down political office in much the same way the Gandhis were able to do so over the decades.
That is not enough to calm the squatters. Many are fishermen who do not want to move inland, and practically all distrust that enough new government housing will be built in an impoverished country with a history of graft.
Benjamin Philip Romualdez, president of the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines
The [Romualdez] family says it is for the squatters’ good; the area was so exposed that even the evacuation center, in a school, was overwhelmed. Waves and wind slammed cars and other debris repeatedly into bodies that were trapped against the school’s walls, a local official said, sending sprays of blood onto terrified parents and children seeking shelter there. Even some in the federal government, stacked with rivals of the Romualdez family, say such vulnerable land should be abandoned.
Before you dismiss such statements as so much plutocratic hypocritical posturing, consider this (from Quartz, November 21, 2013; blue font):
The city of Tacloban, devastated by Typhoon Haiyan (or Yolanda, as it is known in the Philippines) is finally showing signs of rebirth.
A handful of businesses have recently opened, according to government reports, with ATMs coming online and stores selling their wares along the city’s main streets. While thousands of survivors have fled to nearby communities, dismayed by the damage and a local government so dysfunctional that corpses still haven’t been picked up, others are starting to rebuild homes and businesses from the rubble. “For Taclobanos, life will go on,” a local television station promised.
But should life return to normal?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2]