When flames swept through the chipboard and corrugated iron of Bangkok's Bonkai slum two years ago, 50-year-old Kai Pongsongsee and her son clutched their most expensive possession and dashed for the street.
The color television, saved by the family's passion for kick boxing, now sits in Kai's new two-story concrete house in a building project hailed as a model for housing the poor in Asia.
Just over half a billion Asians live in slums and the UN expects the number to double by 2030 because of rapid population growth and urbanization.
PHOTO: REUTERS
"It's so comfortable, I'll never leave this place whatever anyone offers me," Kai said, looking up from a sewing machine that helps her earn US$1 for every 1kg of aprons she stitches.
Kai, who left her farming village for a servant's life in Bangkok at the age of 11, shared a tent with her taxi-driver husband, two children, son-in-law and two grandchildren before buying the US$5,000 terrace house from the slum's cooperative.
The 50m2 house occupies the site of a wooden shack she bought in the Bonkai slum for US$3,000 seven years ago.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Then, she had no right over the land in an expensive part of Bangkok among embassies and sparkling new skyscraper offices and next to a plush executive club.
But Kai can now sleep easy because the Bonkai community has sealed a 15-year lease from Thailand's biggest landlord, the Crown Property Bureau, which manages the royal family's assets.
The slum's cooperative borrowed US$900,000 from a state-funded body, at one percent annual interest, to build 200 houses it sold to the 2,000 victims of the fire at 3 percent interest.
It now plans to borrow more to build houses for the 1,200 people who live in a corner of the slum untouched by the blaze, still a honeycomb of shacks and open drains, where clothes, chillies and garlic sausages are ranged to dry in the sun.
The money the cooperative earns from the extra interest funds emergency loans to residents, who typically work on construction sites, sell noodles or thread flower garlands sold to motorists in the city's notorious traffic jams.
Several men serve in the slum's new fire brigade, manning a converted pick-up truck, but they have been called into action only once, to catch a python the length of an oar.
Residents helped build the new houses and Kai was a foreman.
"It was really fun," she said. "I checked everything met specifications and if there was a problem, I told the chairman."
The chairman of the cooperative, Sangwaen Boonson, said he helped set up the slum organization after seeing police evict squatters when he was a truck driver two decades ago.
"The police were beating everyone," Sangwaen said. "And I just thought, that could happen to us any day."
A firm which leased land in Bonkai once tried to clear the slum but demonstrations stalled it and, in the end, the company went bust during the 1997 to 1998 Asian economic crisis.
"Around 300 police came with bulldozers, but we armed ourselves with rocks and attacked them," Sangwaen said. "The bulldozer drivers ran away, their heads bleeding."
Sangwaen now receives visitors from around the world wanting to see how Bonkai residents have improved their lives. This year he has met groups from East Timor, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Nepal, Iran and Kenya and the UN's top housing official.
"It's encouraging what you're seeing in central Bangkok," said Anna Tibaijuka, head of UN Habitat, a Tanzanian who advocates improving occupancy rights for slum dwellers.
"You have to negotiate with the poor," she said. "If you're not shooting them, the poor will just move from one place to the next. It's futile to think you can get rid of the poor."
On its Web site, UN Habitat says investing resources in massive social housing schemes is a "don't" of slum policy.
But the Thai government has done just this since Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was inspired by Moscow's tower blocks during a trip to Russia two years ago.
Thaksin said his government would build a million subsidized homes in five years to help spur the economy.
Hopeful factory workers and low-level civil servants have been queuing in the thousands to reserve one.
Bangkok authorities say they will move thousands of squatters into the apartment blocks, mostly on the outskirts of the city.
Critics say the move has been tried before and does not work because many poor people prefer to sell at a profit and return to squatting if they have no say in where they live.
The body that lent to the Bonkai slum, the Community Organisations Development Institute (CODI), helps Thailand's 5,500 slums buy land or negotiate occupancy pacts.
The Bonkai community has emerged from the fire stronger than ever, Sangwaen said.
"Business people think this land is expensive and it should be used more efficiently to get more money. But now we have new rights we will fight to keep them," he said.
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