Naga City Awarded 716 Land Titles in a Year. The Audit Record Does Not Show It.

Naga City awarded 716 land titles to eight homeowners associations over the past year through Kaantabay sa Kauswagan, its urban poor programme. The city is also moving roughly P571 million through four separate housing schemes. Naga publishes more of its own paperwork than any other local government in Bicol, and it still does not publish the two records that would let a resident check either figure.

What Naga City actually awarded

Naga City awarded 716 land titles, not places on a waiting list. Eight homeowners associations received them inside twelve months, under Kaantabay sa Kauswagan, a programme the city has run since the late 1980s.

The distinction matters because the other numbers in this story are commitments rather than completions:

Scheme	Families	Amount
Community Mortgage Programme, Mabolo and Sabang	365	over P25 million
Enhanced Community Mortgage Programme	420	P65.8 million
Liberty Villages 1 and 2	488 expected	not published
DHSUD funding, 4PH	not stated	P480 million

The ECMP total breaks down as 125 families in Mabolo Village Phase 1, 133 in Mabolo Village Phase 2, and 162 in Saint Joseph Homeowners Association Inc. Two construction projects sit alongside them: a 320-unit rental housing project in Barangay Lerma and a 300-unit modular shelter community in Barangay Pacol. Both are public works of the kind we track against what was promised.

Add the published peso figures and you get about P571 million. The city’s own June announcement put its housing investment at “nearly P700 million”, which is a P129 million gap between the two statements. Neither figure is broken down per project in anything Naga has published.

Which programmes are doing the work

Naga City is running four housing programmes at once, and they are not interchangeable: Kaantabay sa Kauswagan, the Community Mortgage Programme and its enhanced version, the national 4PH scheme, and an Employees’ Housing Program.

Kaantabay sa Kauswagan is Naga’s own, and it is the one that produced the 716 titles. It predates every national scheme in this list.

The Community Mortgage Programme and its enhanced version are financed through the Social Housing Finance Corporation. These convert occupancy into ownership for people already living on the land.

The Expanded Pambansang Pabahay para sa Pilipino, or 4PH, is the national programme carrying the P480 million from the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development. It builds new units rather than titling existing ones.

The Employees’ Housing Program appears in the city’s own June statement alongside private partners BellaVita Land Corp. and the Pag-IBIG Fund, with no beneficiary count attached.

Why Naga is the right city to check this against

Naga City is the most transparent local government in Bicol and it is not close, publishing seven of the twelve disclosures we check. It runs a separate People’s Budget Portal, and it is the only LGU in the region with a budget portal at all.

We audited twelve standard disclosures across Bicol’s local governments on 17 August 2026. Naga publishes seven of them: Full Disclosure Policy, annual budget, bids and procurement, Citizens Charter, ordinances, executive orders, and elected officials.

That is the highest score in the region. It is also the reason the gaps are worth naming rather than shrugging at. A city that publishes this much is a city that could publish the rest.

The five disclosures Naga does not publish

The disclosures Naga City does not publish are five of the twelve we check: the Transparency Seal, the Bids and Awards Committee record, the Annual Procurement Plan, SALNs, and COA audit reports.

Listed plainly:

• Transparency Seal
• Bids and Awards Committee
• Annual Procurement Plan
• SALN
• COA audit reports

Two of those five are the ones this story turns on. The Annual Procurement Plan would show how the rental housing and modular shelter contracts were planned and put out to bid. The COA audit reports would show whether the money that has already moved was spent as stated.

Without them, a resident of Barangay Pacol can read that a 300-unit shelter community is coming, and has no published document against which to check who is building it, for how much, or on what schedule. The claim and the verification live in different places, and only one of them is public.

What the record does not establish

The Naga housing record does not establish six things, and each one is the sort of detail a resident would need:

• How many of the 716 titles are fully transferred versus awarded pending final payment under the mortgage programmes
• Which eight homeowners associations received them, and in which barangays
• Whether the P571 million in published figures and the city’s “nearly P700 million” describe the same portfolio in different months, or different portfolios
• The completion status of the 320 rental units in Lerma and the 300 modular units in Pacol
• Whether the 488 families expected at Liberty Villages 1 and 2 have been selected, and how
• What the 4PH P480 million buys, in units, at what unit cost

The documents that would answer these are Naga’s Annual Procurement Plan, the COA annual audit report for the city, and SHFC’s own release records for the CMP and ECMP takeouts. The first two are among the five the city does not publish. We checked the same twelve disclosures across every LGU in the region, and the pattern is regional rather than particular to Naga.

The part worth holding onto

Naga is not the problem case here. It is the best case, and the best case still leaves the audit trail out.

716 titles is a real outcome and the families holding them are better off for it. The point is narrower than praise or criticism: on current disclosure, nobody outside city hall can verify the number, the spending behind it, or the procurement that produced the units still to come. For a programme this size, that is a documentation gap rather than a performance one, and it is the cheaper of the two to fix.

Source Bicolmail Newspaper, reported 4 September 2026. Written from the original report.