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.