Integration of delivery team insights in Cebu’s affordable housing resolution

Technical insights on affordable housing in Cebu City, in the Philippines, by the UK Prosperity Fund’s Global Future Cities South East Asia delivery team have made a direct impact on our city partner’s strategies and policies for urban change.

In August 2020, our delivery team produced technical notes outlining recommended approaches to the various components of the Global Future Cities Cebu City Intervention Programme. Focus areas included higher education, flood and drainage, traffic management, city data management, and strategic approaches to affordable housing.

 Most notable was the technical note on the affordable housing strategy. Using data and trends from past censuses, the team projected the city population and households. We also estimated housing demand from 2020 to 2040, by extrapolating on income data. From these figures, five potential strategies were proposed to close the city’s housing demand gap.

Following its distribution amongst key officers of the Cebu City Government, the technical note provided a key input and the basis for the Local Housing Board’s most recent city resolution “declaring all untitled alienable [and] disposable lands of the public domain within Cebu City, whether occupied or not, [to be] reserved as prospective sites for socialised and economic public housing and other public purposes”.

This is a huge step forward, as the technical note has essentially laid down the necessary groundwork to facilitate the implementation of the strategies to come. With this, we look forward to another 14 months of working closely with the city in pursuit of the alleviation and resolution of its key urban challenges. 

Allen Williams (left), Team Leader for Cebu, Philippines intervention and Royston Brockman (right), Affordable Housing Specialist.