Community-driven land tenure strategies: the experiences of the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines

This paper describes and discusses community-driven land tenure initiatives to address the issue of access to land in urban areas in the Philippines. This includes countering actual and threatened displacements from market-driven land, housing and urban development policies, mega-infrastructure development and disasters. The paper begins with a review of the relevant Philippines land and housing policies and their implications. It then describes the experience of the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines with three different land acquisition strategies (direct negotiated purchase, the Community Mortgage Programme, and usufruct schemes) in responding to the need for land and housing and to threats of, or actual, displacements. This includes case studies of community-led land acquisition initiatives by federation homeowners associations in Montalban, Iloilo and Albay (direct purchase), Quezon City (Community Mortgage Programme) and Quezon City and Muntinlupa (usufruct). It then considers what has been learned from these initiatives and what they imply for enabling mechanisms and policies to benefit self-help, low-income communities in their land tenure improvement initiatives. This includes a discussion of the potential advantages of usufruct in securing tenure more easily than with conventional land titling programmes.