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.