Community Mortgage Program — The Philippines' Community Land-Purchase Financing Scheme

Established in 1986 in the wake of the People Power Revolution and formalised under the Philippines' National Shelter Program (Republic Act 7279, 1992), the Community Mortgage Program (CMP) lets legally organised associations of informal settler families collectively purchase the land they occupy — or alternative land — develop basic infrastructure and build housing, with the community itself, rather than individual households, holding the mortgage. It has been administered since 2004 by the Social Housing Finance Corporation (SHFC) under Executive Order 272.

The programme's objective is to give informal settler families a collective, affordable financing route to secure land tenure and build housing, by pooling the community as the borrowing unit rather than requiring individual households to qualify for conventional mortgages.

Settler families organise into legally recognised associations, which then apply to purchase the occupied (or alternative) land collectively, develop basic infrastructure and construct housing, with SHFC (previously the National Home Mortgage Finance Corporation, NHMFC) providing and administering the collective mortgage financing.

Independent academic assessment (Porio, Crisol, Magno, Cid & Paul, 2004, in Empowering Squatter Citizen, Routledge) found CMP had assisted 106,273 poor families in securing housing and land tenure across 854 communities between 1991 and 2001, with loan collection rates outperforming competing housing-finance schemes, describing it at the time as the Philippines' 'most responsive and cost-effective' government housing finance programme. By other government and academic accounts, the programme has since enabled over 300,000 households toward homeownership, with the Marikina City local government alone relocating and housing more than 30,000 families through CMP by 2006.

The scheme has faced sustained funding pressure: recurring financial strain within its originating agency, NHMFC, has periodically slowed disbursement. A 2011 critique from the urban-poor organisation Kadamay argued CMP still fails households with no stable income to service even subsidised loan repayments, meaning the very poorest informal settlers can be excluded from a scheme designed for them.