Lesson learn from CODI, Thailand (2)

LAND for housing :

The city-wide community upgrading process has become a kind of “back door” urban land reform.

Too many poor people stay in their same old insecure communities, locked for years in an unending pattern of
fear, insecurity and squalor, never being able to improve their living conditions because their tenure status is so
precarious, never being able to plan for the future because the future is so uncertain. Life can go on like that
forever. But when people decide to move out and chose other land, finally the pattern changes! This is their land! Nobody can evict them! The whole sense changes. This is what is important!

Land tenure is always an important factor in determining the success or failure of any slum upgrading program. Poor communities struggle with the land issue in Thailand also, where they still experience serious problems accessing secure land for their housing: problems of control over public land use being too centralized, of the commercialization and commodification of land, ofskyrocketing land values, of changing land uses and of eviction and displacement. Land is no easy factor, and all the economic, commercial and political pressures on land make it all that more difficult. But here in Thailand, the flexible finance which the Baan Mankong Program offers is allowing people the power to search for alternative land themselves. Under the program, it is the responsibility of each community to negotiate themselves for secure land, by buying or renting the land they already occupy, or else buying or renting land they find elsewhere.

As a result, a great deal of land searching is going on around the country and hundreds of communities are in the thick of land lease and purchase negotiations with all kinds of public and private land-owners. Even in cities where local authorities have long insisted there is no room for the poor, communities are managing to find pieces of secure land to buy cheaply or lease.

All this wheeling and dealing to get secure land could be called a new kind of urban land reform for poor people’s housing. But it is a type of land reform that is highly decentralized, highly informal and highly unconventional, and it’s being imlemented by the people who are themselves in the greatest need of secure land. What is extraordinary is that even in a context where the laws are clearly stacked against the poor, and where the country’s legal system and land politics continue to work in favor of haves over the have-nots, these land negotiations are still happening on a very large scale.

Instead of taking on a struggle against inequities in the legal system, or pushing for this act or that
legislation, the tools the Baan Mankong Program offers poor communities allows people to sidestep that whole battle, in which the poor would probably be the losers anyway. Instead, they can undertake landreform right away, in practical ways, by quietly finding land, using their knowledge of their cities and the modest tool of this flexible finance at their disposal. In this form of land reform, people work it out, they empower themselves and they believe they can do it because they see all their peers doing it. When communities take the initiative in negotiating for secure land, it pushes them once and for all out of the passive victim mode and gives them the upper hand. Why? Because all of the sudden they’re exploring options, they’re the ones doing the searching, the selecting, the negotiating, the deal-making. Instead of waiting around passively for the eviction to happen, or the relocation to be announced to whoknows-what-godforsaken land, poor communities around Thailand are exploring their own territory and drawing up their own lists of land options. In these ways, communities are changing the game to be on their own terms.

They search for land that is possible and that works for them, they choose the land and they negotiate the terms on which they get that land, and then they develop their housing and community plans on that land - all because they know they have the flexible financial resource at their disposal and they have their togetherness as a community.

Finding secure land :
it’s something like an “ARMY OF ANTS”

When you have flexible and reachable finance, and when people are confident it is available and
open to them to deal with their insecure land and housing needs, there is room for all kinds of variety in how those needs can be met. If people can negotiate to buy or lease the land they already occupy, great. And if they can’t, then they can find land elsewhere that is available and suitable and cheap and not too far from their existing settlement. There are so many kinds of land in Thai cities: temple land, municipal government land, central government land and many types of private land. Because people don’t have a lot of money, and because the Baan Mankong program sets rather low ceilings on how much communities can borrow for land and housing, people need to be very, very creative. But once they come together as a community and as networks of communities within cities, the possibilities for finding alternative land multiply fast and the resourcefulness and energy starts pouring out.

Some staff in CODI have described this process as being something like a very large army of ants being let loose across the country. These thousands and thousands of ants are very busy scanning their local territory, searching for available land and coming up with some very interesting pieces of vacant private and public land that have been “hiding” in the cracks of some 250 towns and cities - land that no government agency or NGO or researcher might ever have found or thought of as possible.This army of ants, with its colonies in all the different cities and provinces, is very well connected. There is a good grapevine of ideas and knowledge about land which is constantly being shared and transferred, and this means possibilities increase exponentially.

Some communities may feel more secure if theycan get cooperative title to a piece of land and so
will negotiate with private land owners to buy various kinds of land. There are many categories of private land rights in Thailand, running along a spectrum from full freehold land title (which is the most secure) to user rights (which can be converted later to full title, after a certain number of years of occupation). The more secure the title, the more expensive the price for the land, so many poor communities are opting to buy cheap land with rights that can be upgraded to full title later.But many communities are also negotiating some very interesting land solutions on public land, under a variety of public land owning agencies. In many of the smaller towns and cities, communities prefer to negotiate lease contracts on public land, where it is possible for them to negotiate very cheap land lease rates, cheaper even than the cost of purchasing cheap private land in those towns and cities.

When poor communities negotiate with public land owning agencies and are able to build some initial housing projects or upgrade some existing communities, it is a powerful way of showing these public agencies new possibilities. In the third and fourth years of the Baan Mankong Program, we are seeing increasing numbers of examples of good cooperation with government land-owning departments, after gradually proving to these agencies that commercial exploitation is not the only reasonable use for public land assets, but that decent new housing for the poor, which allows them to develop themselves and improve their lives in every way, is a reasonable and socially equitable way to use public land resources. And these communities are not asking for free land. Through the upgrading program, public land upon which hundreds of informal settlements have been squatting, can be transformed into “developed land” which generates a modest rental income, without that agency having to spend a penny! Many of these public land-owning agencies are seeing now that by giving longterm leases to poor communities, they can help provide housing for a good group of people who can transform their vulnerable and dilapidated living conditions into proper decent communities. And for this, these public

landlords have every reason to be proud. Here are a few details about cooperation to provide secure landtenure to communities on land belonging to some of the key public land-owning agencies in Thailand.

Lesson Learn fom CODI, Thailand (1)

Using PUBLIC LAND for housing the poor :

TREASURY DEPARTMENT : The greatest majority of public land in Thailand is under the control of the Treasury Department, so this is an extremely important public land-owning agency for urban poor communities. Cooperation with the Treasury Department on Baan Mankong has been very good. In the early years of the upgrading program, CODI signed an MOU with the Treasury Department to cut land rental rates in half and give longer-term lease contracts to many communities on Treasury Department land. Then in 2006, the process spread out to include all of the Treasury Department’s provincial public land offices, which are now routinely granting 30-year renewable leases to poor community cooperatives upgrading or building new communities on their land, at fairly uniform, nominal rates. There is still some negotiating going on, but it keeps getting better and easier for communities on Treasury Department land to get favorable and long-term leases.

Many of these provincial land offices are now even approaching the community networks and CODI with offers of un-used parcels of public land under their control for developing relocation projects, in cases where other communities or scattered renters and squatters cannot upgrade on site, according to the city-wide surveys of people with housing problems. Also, in In many old communities on Treasury Department land, where some people have individual land leases and others don’t, the communities are linking together through the Baan Mankong program, forming a cooperative and renegotiating a new, long-term lease as a community cooperative and then upgrading or reblocking their settlements in situ.

CROWN PROPERTY BUREAU : The Crown Property Bureau (CPB) is another very big landlord of slum communities in Bangkok and other cities. CODI has just signed a new MOU with CPB to provide long-term collective lease contracts to 30 informal communities around the country, in which the bureau asked CODI to help organize on-site upgrading projects. The Baan Mankong budget for five of these communities has already been approved and work is starting. Three of these projects will be land sharing projects.

STATE RAILWAY OF THAILAND : The State Railway of Thailand (SRT) has always been one of the most difficult public landlords. In 2006, CODI signed an MOU with SRT to allow 14 squatter communities on railway land to upgrade on-site, with a long-term (15-30 year) cooperative lease to the land. Now CODI has signed a new MOU with SRT to allow another 100 squatter communities on SRT land around the country to upgrade on-site with a long-term (15-30 year) cooperative land leases. Because the SRT has so far felt uncomfortable leasing the land directly to these communities, like the other public land owning agencies, they have asked CODI to act as an intermediary. So the land for all these projects is being leased to CODI, which then sub-leases to the community cooperatives.This is not an ideal solution, but it allows these important precedent-settingupgrading projects to go ahead, and hopefully, the next batch of leases on SRT land can be direct.

BUDDHIST TEMPLES : Control over the enormous land assets ofThailand’s thousands of Buddhist temples has recently been partially centralized. When communities on temple-owned land negotiate directly with their temple, they can get a lease of no more than three years. If they want a longer lease than that, they have to negotiate with the central government’s National Buddhist Department. The Wat Potee Wararam Community, in Udon Thani, was the first community to successfully negotiate with this agency to get a 30-year cooperative lease for the land they occupy and have upgraded. Now that there is a precedent, it has been easier for other communities on temple land to negotiate similar long-term land leases.

WATERWAY BANKS DEPARTMENT : Many of Thailand’s thousands of canal and river-side communities have squatted on the narrow strips of leftover land between the canals (controlled by the Irrigation Department) and the internal land (controlled by various public and private land-owners). The central government’s Waterways Banks Department, which controls these swampy margins, has in the past been a notoriously difficult agency to deal with, and the answer to requests for secure tenure has always been no. But now, in an increasing number of precedent-setting cases, these settlements have been successful in negotiating long-term leases. The more cases get the leases, the easier it is for the next ones to negotiate.

An example worth following :

Now don’t be thinking things were always so rosy in Thailand! These public landlords in Thailand, with whom longterm community lease contracts are being negotiated, were not allways so cooperative or so friendly towards the poor, but had to be convinced along the way, through a long effort which combined creativity, diplomacy and negotiation by the communities, the networks, CODI and local governments and NGOs. But there are two main conditions necessary for breakthroughs with these public landlords : you have to work on a huge scale, and you have to have the financeya available to achieve this scale of upgrading. Many Asian countries have similar problems of overly “stiff” public land-owning agencies, which are forever reluctant to allow their land to be used for poor people’s housing, even though in so many Asian cities, most slums are already on public land. This attitude makes it extremely difficult to negotiate upgrading and secure tenure arrangements on any significant scale. That is why the Baan Mankong Program is such an important example for other Asian governments, to show them that using public land assets for poor people’s housing is right and is possible.