The Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), and the Social Housing Finance Corp. (SHFC), issued new rules recently on socialized housing projects under the High Density Housing and the Community Mortgage Program (CMP), to cut down processing time for documents.
For CMP, communities and homeowners associations will now only have to submit 9 documents from the previous 27 documents.
The new rules were signed recently by Vice President and HUDCC chairperson Leni Robredo and SHFC President Ana Oliveros at the Villa Robredo CMP Project in Naga City.
“SHFC itself will procure several documents from government agencies and LGUs on behalf the communities,” said Oliveros.
Over the years, stakeholders contended with bureaucratic red tape that takes them as long as 2 years for documents to be processed.
“We want to make our services for efficient so we can scale up the number of families we can serve,” said the Vice President. “Ultimately, our goal is streamline all processes and processing time will be reduced to 15 – 30 days.”
Socialized housing projects were delayed in the past due to conflicting registrations of homeowners associations in HLURB.
For the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), beneficiaries of housing programs had to be absent from work, or their livelihoods, and incur travel expenses since the processing of capital gains tax exemptions (CGTE) were centralized at the head office in Manila.
Under the proposed agreements, HLURB is developing an online integrated database for the registration of homeowners, while the BIR will decentralize processing of CGTE applications.
HLURB is also working with the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to come up with a land use plan that will eliminate the need for communities to get another level of clearance from DAR to convert agricultural to residential lands for on-site projects.
SHFC will likewise coordinate with the Land Registration Authority (LRA) to facilitate the issuance of the titles covering community-housing projects.
The initiative stemmed from a series of consultations with various groups from the urban poor.
“This is also in line with our strategy to mainstream community-driven approaches to urban development and housing,” Robredo said.
