A good point

Early yesterday morning, Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella, in an interview over ABS-CBN, elicited mixed emotional reaction from me. The subject was the frightful rise of COVID-19 infections in our city. Labella mentioned that the multiplications of COVID-19 cases were found in depressed areas, primarily because residents there live in almost elbow-to-elbow atmosphere, in a manner of speaking. He even said that only walls serve to separate supposed houses, or words to that effect. No “social distancing” is possible in that kind of living lifestyle and in such close person-to-person contact, the spread of the virus would be inevitable.

 My first emotional expression out of the interview came in a form of a smile. My lady, Carmen, asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: “Ngano nag smile ka diha?” Many times in the past, I wrote about this blighted living condition in areas where informal settlers dwell. In those write-ups, I never failed to cite the work of Dean Jeremias Montemayor, Ours to Share. In his study, the Law dean cited the lure of the city that attracted thousands of our countrymen from the provinces to migrate to urban centers, including Cebu City. The idea of stopping farm work under the sun and coming to the city to become drivers, janitors, and security guards in air-conditioned malls was irresistible. Since those settlers owned no real property in the cities, they became squatters by force of circumstance. I smiled yesterday morning because I surmised that Labella must have shared with me in that Montemayor teaching on the cause of the emergence of squatter areas.

I believe that next my eyes squinted and deep furrows registered on my ageing forehead. It was the second physical expression of my emotion. Carmen lamented: “Ngano nga nag kisdum man pud imong nawong?” Upon the mention by Labella of the congested homes in some sitios of the city, I remembered that more than 30 years ago, I authored the ordinance allowing the residents of a part of Barangay Lorega-San Miguel to buy from the city the parcels of land where they built their homes. It was my belief that upon their lot acquisition, the residents would cease being squatters and start building an environmentally-better community. That probably was a crude way of addressing the social problem but it was an idea worth improving on. But my eyes squinted because it seemed that nobody seemed to work to make that concept a reality.

Apparently, upon hearing a point Labella raised, I smiled because Carmen said: “O, nagpahiyum man lagi ka?” Truth to tell, I again wrote on that issue recently. In my June 11 Off Tangent article, (coincidentally, it was the birthday of Carmen and our youngest child, Atty. Charisse) I said that “xxx the spread in viral infection may be prevented by people and houses safely distanced. xxx The city has to adopt a new urban planning scheme that puts homes in safe appreciable distances. xxx It may not be quick and easy. Social hurt will initially be felt deeply with squatter shanties having to be demolished while the costs will be economically staggering. But reinventing the way we live to conform to the demands of this new normal is inevitable. There must no longer be congested habitation. xxx Doing it soon will reduce the possibility of the recurrence of cataclysmic disasters”. I smiled because this must be in the mind of Labella as work to do when this crisis is over!