An Assessment on the National Housing Authority's Resettlement Program: A Case Study on the PNR Project-Affected Families Relocated to Northville 4, Marilao, Bulacan

Abstract

Development-induced projects usually cause the displacement of the urban poor. The rail-development project of the government known as "North Rail and South Rail projects” necessitates the dislocation of the informal settlers living along railway lines. The movement of these informal settlers from their old community to a new one is considered an involuntary resettlement. Resettlement is currently perceived as a development issue since the government usually implements this alternative program whenever there are infrastructure projects affecting families in the targeted area. Oftentimes, these infrastructure projects were given importance over the resettlement programs causing hardships and impoverishment to the project-affected families. On this context, the researcher explored the effects of resettlement on the affected families caused by the rail-development project initiated by the government. This study evaluated the effects of the National Housing Authority's (NHA) resettlement program to project-affected families relocated in the resettlement site located at Northville 4, Marilao, Bulacan. Based on the findings of this study, the resettlement of the project-affected families to Northville 4 resulted to difficulty of access or even inaccessibility to livelihood, educational institutions, basic needs— such as electricity and water connection, as well as difficulty of access to health services or health centers. This study concluded that NHA's resettlement program is satisfactory in the pre-relocation and relocation activities. However, NHA's resettlement program remains unsatisfactory on the post-relocation stage due to relocatees5 ongoing concerns on access to livelihood, and other basic needs.