Episode 19: Community Finance and Slum Upgrading in Bangkok with Hayden Shelby

Shelby, "Empowerment or responsibility? Collective finance for slum upgrading in Thailand"

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Episode Summary: The international tour continues! This week we interviewed Hayden Shelby, Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati, about her research into the Baan Mankong (“Secure Housing”) program in Bangkok, Thailand. Built on the principles of community organizing, finance, and ownership, Baan Mankong has been celebrated as a global model of participatory slum/settlement upgrading for developing countries. But for all its successes, the program is not without its drawbacks, raising difficult questions about the balance between empowerment of poor residents on one hand, and the shirking of state responsibilities on the other. The lessons being learned in Thailand also have implications for community land trusts, tenant opportunity to purchase, and related programs in the U.S. and beyond.

  • “In the most basic terms, the Baan Mankong financial model relies on loans provided to individuals through community-based cooperatives … All projects begin by establishing savings groups, where community members must collectively save ten percent of what they intend to borrow in lieu of collateral. Total loans can be up to 330,000 THB (∼10,000 USD) per household on a 15-year term from the government agency that administers the programme, the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI).”

 

  • “[I]t is now nearly obligatory for communities to form housing cooperatives that are registered with the Cooperative Promotion Department (CPD) and audited by the Cooperative Auditing Department (CAD). These cooperatives, run by a rotating committee of community members, are the legal entities that represent the community in transactions with the government and private enterprises. The cooperative takes out the initial loan from CODI at a four percent interest rate and manages subsidies for infrastructure and community development. It is from the cooperative that individual households take out loans for housing construction … Cooperatives generally charge communities a two to four percent margin to cover their own operating expenses, meaning the interest paid by households is shared by CODI and the cooperatives (Boonyabancha, 2003). In addition, each member owns shares in the cooperative and pays associated fees each month. The minimum and maximum number can be set by the community within limits set by the CPD. Members can invest in the cooperative by purchasing more shares, and this is often encouraged as a means of savings.”

 

  • “Second, Thailand has a long history of promoting cooperatives as a means of collective financial management, primarily for agriculture (Ingram, 1971; Thuvachote, 2006), and therefore there is a strong pre-existing bureaucratic infrastructure for administering cooperatives … If a Baan Mankong cooperative has been up and running successfully, members in good standing can borrow small amounts of money in addition to their original home loans to make livelihood investments, pay school fees, or cover other expenses in the event of income shortfalls. In this way, the housing cooperative becomes a multi-functional, community-based financial institution.”

 

  • “To summarise, there are three layers of finance involved in the Baan Mankong model. First, a loan is made by CODI to a community’s housing cooperative for the purpose of constructing homes and/or purchasing land. Second, loans are made from the cooperative to the individual households for home construction. Finally, if and when the cooperative has sufficient capital, it can make loans to members for purposes other than housing. Ultimately, in the beginning phases of Baan Mankong projects, the financial model serves the purpose of producing and obtaining housing. If and when communities achieve this end, housing can then become the basis for extending credit for other purposes.”


  • “Baan Mankong is part of a larger global trend in what has been called “people- driven” or “demand-driven” development in slum upgrading that employs collective finance (Boonyabancha, 2009; Satterthwaite, 2001) … The claims to empowerment made by these groups are varied, but three elements are especially prominent in the literature. The first is that they link together poor people in order to share knowledge and build collective political capacity … The second claim to empowerment revolves around a change in status that comes from re-casting the poor as visible and legitimate citizens of the city … “A third element of empowerment claims, which are the focus of this paper, is that of collective finance … In this model, instead of being seen as the problem or the passive recipients of somebody else’s idea of what they need, the poor themselves become the doers and the deliverers of solutions to the huge problems of urban poverty, land and housing in Asian cities.”


  • “In these lofty claims, poor urban residents are being empowered to become financial actors, and in becoming a financial actor leads to the ability to act politically. However, that political action centres around self-reliance, being the “doers” of development. They are delivering not only their own development, but also the development of the cities in which they live. However, I argue these claims of empowerment through finance can slip into responsibilisation,” in which residents are saddled with responsibilities usually reserved for the state.


  • “One area in which this responsibilisation is especially apparent is in finance and debt relations. In housing finance, understanding exactly how debt and financial tools change lives and subjectivities requires a methodological approach that pays attention to the “small stories” of how people navigate housing markets and their attendant financial programmes (Reid, 2017; Smith, 2005). In the realm of housing, Langley (2009) has shown how financial products and their attending categorisations of borrowers turn more and more people into ‘financial actors’ and inject financial logics, including self-discipline, into their everyday lives (Langley, 2008). Likewise, García-Lamarca and Kaika (2016) have further illustrated how debt and its subsequent repayment can structure lives and govern conduct.”

 

  • “The literature analysing housing finance and microfinance reveals the possibility for responsibilisation of community through finance. This raises the first question of this investigation: to what extent is the financial model of Baan Mankong itself–as opposed to other aspects of the programme–empowering? However, most of this literature referenced focuses on modes of finance that are provided by market or other non-governmental actors. Baan Mankong loans originate from an actual wing of the state. This raises the second question: when the state is the originator of loans, how does this affect debt relations? It is these questions that I seek to answer through fine-grained analysis of the creation and management of Baan Mankong communities.”

 

  • “The research in this paper is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2018. The fieldwork entailed three major components: participant observation, community case studies, and interviews. This method serves two main objectives. The first is to observe the ‘everyday’ aspects of finance (Langley, 2008). I then pair this with an ‘ethnography of the state,’ which entails understanding the complex interplay between citizens and the many tentacles of an amorphous state (Ferguson & Gupta, 2002; Gupta, 1995).”

 

  • “Forming a financial community involves multiple steps. The first is creating a savings group that will save the requisite ten percent of what will be borrowed from CODI. At this stage, there is often significant turnover in the community, as some households are ultimately simply not able to save money on top of meeting their basic needs (Shelby, 2018). On the other hand, sometimes other families are recruited either from within the original settlement or from elsewhere once they see that a reliable savings group is up and running.”

 

  • “Once savings groups have been established, communities must form housing cooperatives in order to become a formal legal entity that can take out loans and conduct other legal and business functions. The steps to forming a cooperative are numerous. The committee must create and approve a set of bylaws with over 100 regulations written in complex legal language based on a template provided by the Cooperative Promotion Department (CPD). Communities must document exactly who will hold the housing right for each household. This often involves awkwardly dividing fluid extended families into discrete nuclear households. Sometimes this is simply a matter of dividing a family on paper. In other cases, it actually entails breaking up families if there is not enough money to finance two houses but one house will provide insufficient space. In such cases, the necessity of creating discrete, auditable units that are legible to the state is not a mere act of administration, but a physical, even violent, act of re-forming pre-existing relations.”

 

  • “Huron (2012) has documented the labour involved in creating and managing housing cooperatives. For Baan Mankong communities, that work is intensified by two demands: the work of managing the community, and the additional labour they must perform in order to pay back their debt. Many residents report that before Baan Mankong their life was more sabai– ‘relaxed’—and that they did not have to deal with the work, stress, and conflict entailed in life after Baan Mankong. For all community members, the necessity of saving and then repaying loans amounts to a significant increase in their cost of living. On top of loans for the construction of housing, the formalisation of land rights on government land means a monthly land rental payment that most did not have before. Despite the fact that formalisation adds a layer of legal security, my fieldwork confirms Archer et al. (2012a) finding that this legal security is at least somewhat offset for many families by a sense of financial insecurity because of increased costs. ”

 

  • “[Some] communities get lucky and have someone educated and experienced in financial management, most are not. This means that many communities struggle, requiring significant assistance from CODI staff, often more than is available. The effective management of the cooperative involves extensive knowledge of dozens of bylaws and a solid understanding of proper accounting practices. While in the case of most forms of housing finance, these tasks would be handled by a paid professional with some form of certification, community leaders are expected to manage this complex financial institution unpaid and with only minimal training.”

 

  •  “Not all members of the original settlements that become Baan Mankong projects ultimately join cooperatives and go through with the programme … [M]any reasons for reluctance to join projects revolve around trust. Many residents do not trust that the savings they invest in the initial phase will yield results. Some people told me this lack of trust is directed toward the government. After previous evictions, broken promises by officials, and general political instability, citizens do not believe that the government will follow through on their end of the deal. In other cases, residents do not trust that the money will be well managed by their neighbours. This, it turns out, is well founded. Two case study communities encountered problems with community leaders embezzling money.”

 

  • “What distinguishes Baan Mankong from many other housing microfinance programmes is that the issuer of credit is a state agency. One advantage of this arrangement is that interest rates are kept lower than for most types of commercial loans, where extracting a maximum profit is the primary motive of the lender. However, as I have demonstrated in the preceding three sections, this does not prevent financial logics from shaping participating communities and altering the everyday lives of borrowers … A frequent reason that community members resist coming together is fear of debt— or, in the case of many people, more debt. The problem of informal debt—ni nok rabob—came up constantly in communities. This informal debt was often framed as a failure of personal responsibility.”

 

  • “[T]he collective nature of Baan Mankong homeownership means that residents will not benefit financially from this investment in the same way an individual owner would. Should they decide to sell their homes, they can do so only with the agreement of the cooperative, at a price agreed to by the committee. They would derive minimal monetary profit from selling. This feature of the policy has been explicitly posited as a protection for residents against market forces that might displace them … What, then, is this debt an investment in? For community members themselves, the answer varies. Despite their inability to reap substantial profit from the sale of the house, many do see it as an investment in a future in which their children will not live as khon salum–’slum people.’ This reflects what Baan Mankong’s financial architect, Somsook Boonyabancha has claimed, that ‘The goal of the Baan Mankong upgrading is to get everybody in that community to have security, to become legitimate, ‘normal’ citizens’ (Somsook, 2005, p. 42). For most community members I spoke with, security of tenure and the sense of legitimacy that comes with it was their primary motivation for joining the project. The improved physical conditions were secondary.”

 

  • “For residents, the Baan Mankong process entails new forms of formalised social relations to facilitate the taking out of collectively-managed debt. Many authors writing about the everyday aspects of housing finance seek to connect the individual impacts of financialisation to the global proliferation of finance in housing and the overall expansion of capitalist urbanisation (García-Lamarca & Kaika, 2016; Langley, 2008, 2009). However, I argue that Baan Mankong’s model of housing microfinance operates under a different logic. This logic is not primarily about the intrusion of global property markets into people’s lives, but rather is part and parcel of formalisation and responsibilisation processes that serve state efforts to govern poor urban residents, altering their subjectivities by shaping them into self-reliant citizens who will help to shoulder the burden of development through labour and debt. In this model, taking on debt is a citizen’s responsibility to a benevolent state.”

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hi there. This is the UCLA housingpodcast and I am your host Shane Phillips. Each episode we discuss a different housing research paper with its author, translating it into non academic language to better understand the challenges and potential solutions to the housing crisis. Paavo Monkkonen is my host today, and our guest is Professor Hayden Shelby at the University of Cincinnati. Our interview is about slum upgrading and community finance and ownership in Bangkok, Thailand, where Professor Shelby spent several years doing on the ground research with both community organizations and governmental or quasi governmental agencies. I think this is our first episode about housing policy in a country with a developing economy, so we're excited to try something new this week. The subject of our conversation today is a program called Baan Mankong, which translates to secure housing in Thai. The program's goal is to help residents of informal settlements or slums to form communities and access government subsidized financing that can be used to improve their homes and provide the security that comes with legal ownership recognized by the state. Baan Mankong is much studied and much celebrated around the world and it deserves to be lauded for helping more than 100,000 households in the 20 years that it's existed. Professor Shelby's paper interested us in part because it isn't merely celebratory, and instead offers what she calls a sympathetic critique of the program. A lot of our conversation is focused on the difference between using state authority to empower residents on the one hand and offloading state responsibilities onto poor residents on the other. She puts it very succinctly when she says that the program, "blurs the boundaries between radical alternatives to the market and neoliberal alternatives to the state". And that fuzzy distinction is something I think we can also see to different extents in programs like community land trusts and tenure opportunity to purchase programs here in the States and elsewhere. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. If you want to help the show, give us a five star rating and a review on your favorite podcast app. And be sure to tell your friends and colleagues to give us a listen. Here's Professor Hayden Shelby. Our guest this week is Hayden Shelby, Assistant Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati. And we're going international again with a conversation about slum upgrading, collective finance and community ownership and management in Bangkok, Thailand. Thanks for joining us, Professor Shelby, and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Hayden Shelby 2:42
Thank you, thank you so much for having me. I've become a listener as of late, so I'm happy to be here.

Shane Phillips 2:49
We've said this multiple times. I feel like this is our number one marketing strategy. So far, it's just each person we interview is one new listener, and they hopefully share with others. So even though obviously, many of the challenges that Bangkok residents might face could be different from those here in the US and other countries with more developed economies, I know that a lot of the questions we're going to be grappling with in this conversation are actually pretty similar to ones we're having here. Your abstract does a really great job actually of laying out what we'll be talking about. So let me just read the latter half of that right now. You say "in this article, I offer a sympathetic critique of Baan Mankong, the participatory slum upgrading program. By analyzing how this financial model actually plays out on the ground through an in depth ethnographic study of the policy and its participants. I conclude that despite the policies intentions to empower communities through access to collective finance, many participants find themselves struggling with debt and living under a new form of financialized community that reshapes their social relations with neighbors and burdens them with the responsibility for financing and carrying out development desired by the state". A big emphasis is also on the question of whether this program is empowering residents or if it's actually just offloading the responsibilities of the state onto them. And there's not a sharp dividing line between those two realities. I should also note that as long as we have a Bangkok housing expert, we're going to call you that here, we're going to learn all we can from you about this mega city's housing market and it's urban planning and governance. So that's where we're headed. Professor Paavo Monkkonen is my co-host this time. Happy New Year, Paavo.

Paavo Monkkonen 4:36
Hey, happy new year, Managing Director of the Lewis Center Housing Initiative, Shane Phillips. It's great to get to see you and welcome Hayden. I'm really excited. This is I think this is the paper that has been fastest from learning about it to podcast so far. I just discovered it a few weeks ago and I was so excited because I've been long interested in CODI and the Baan Mankong program and I'm really I love the sympathetic critique approach, because a lot of stuff that's been written about is just kind of pure laudatory...

Hayden Shelby 5:08
It's become a model.

Paavo Monkkonen 5:09
Yeah. You know, and working in Hong Kong and when Indonesia you hear a lot about this program and so I think it's great that you've done this research on it. So I'm excited to talk to you about it

Hayden Shelby 5:20
Thank you, I'm excited to share some thoughts.

Shane Phillips 5:24
So first, we're gonna go on our tour, and you've already informed me that we're going to be touring Bangkok this time. So tell us what we should see.

Hayden Shelby 5:32
Alright, so I am going to take you on a tour of what I consider sort of my neighborhood in Bangkok. It's along the Ramkhamhaeng Road, near Ramkhamhaeng University. It's to the eastern side of the city, and it's not really super accessible by like SkyTrain, but it's relatively proximate to a lot of the organizations I did my research with. And there are a few things I want to show you. So first of all, if you're coming from the central city, the easiest way to get there, because Bangkok traffic is terrible, is the canal boat. So you get on and the canal. And this... it's one of the hidden gems of Bangkok. Because first of all, it's very fast and efficient. But also it gives you this view of the city that you really feel like you're seeing the back of the city in a really interesting way. And you're literally often looking at the backs of houses as you're going along. But they're also walkways along it. So you see people like going about their life. And it's this great way to see like the everyday aspects of Bangkok living. So you take the canal boat, and you get off around Ramkhamhaeng University, and it's a university area so there's lots of cool shops, lots of young people, but it's also close to the Sports Authority of Thailand, where a lot of the country's elite athletes are sort of house and where they train. And the best part about this location between the Sports 30 and the university is that a couple of evenings a week there is a fantastic night market. And this market you can get electronics, you can get clothing, you can get housing goods, but for for our purposes on this tour, you can get food from every part of the country sold in this market. So you can get you know, any style of fried rice, lots of curries, plenty of mango and sticky rice, coconut ice cream, whatever you want. So I'm taking you, we get our food. And this is the really fun part is that so we're near where all of the elite athletes are, and close to this market there are Takraw courts. And for listeners who don't know what Takraw is, it, the best way to explain it is that it's volleyball you play with your feet. And there are these balls, they're originally like, kind of like wicker balls, but some of them are plastic. And really skilled players actually do play this like volleyball on two sides of a court. And they can spike these balls with their feet, they actually do like hitch kicks up in the air and invert themselves and spike the ball. And it's a sport that I had never encountered before spending time in Thailand. And to get the chance to just sort of casually see people who are really, really good at it play, that sort of combination of getting some food at the night market and watching like pickup Takraw matches is like my favorite thing to do.

Shane Phillips 8:44
Yeah, that sounds amazing. I didn't tell Paavo this, but I went to Bangkok and Hanoi like four years ago. And mainly because of language barrier, I can barely remember like the names of any neighborhoods or anything. But the overwhelming takeaway for me was just the chaos of both cities in like a good and a bad way. But it's just... I'm sure this will come up when we're talking about the housing as well, there does not seem to be planning going on at all in the city. I'm sure there's something happening, but we'll get to that.

Hayden Shelby 9:19
Yeah, it's funny. I whenever I'm in a taxi and people ask me what I'm doing, and I tell them that I study city planning, they're like, "well, it's a good thing you're here"

Paavo Monkkonen 9:31
That's what they say everywhere. I mean,

Hayden Shelby 9:33
That's absolutely true. People say that here as well. But yeah, I think one of the... I mean, you know, what often looks like chaos is the fascinating thing to me about the city. It is so full of life. And like yeah, I discover something new absolutely every day that I'm walking around that city.

Shane Phillips 9:55
Yeah, yeah, I was just walking like 20 miles every day just seeing all I could.

Okay, so before we talk about the Cooperative Housing Finance Program evaluated in your paper, we were hoping you could just give us an idea of what the housing policy landscape looks like in Bangkok. Paavo and I are starting, I think from a very limited base here. So we'd be interested in just about anything you find interesting. In particular, I know we'd love to know your thoughts on David Dowall's articles about Bangkok, which we'll link to in the show notes, and what you think we should know about urban governance in Bangkok, our US listeners may have heard about the political unrest in Thailand. So some of that background may be helpful for understanding the context of your research paper, and the government's Community Organizations Development Institute program, or CODI, which Paavo referenced earlier.

Hayden Shelby 10:47
Yeah. So I think I will start by saying, I think Thailand has has had two claims to fame in the housing world over the past, let's say 40 years. One is Baan Mankong that we're going to talk about today. But the other one was sort of as an example of what in the 80s and 90s was known as the market enabling approach to producing housing in developing countries, and that's where these these papers by David Dowel come in. So the the idea here was that... so let's start back in, you know, the 1960s, like a lot of places in the world, Bangkok was rapidly urbanizing, the population was growing, there was growth in slum settlements. And they experimented with a few different methods that were around the world, they in 1972, they created a National Housing Authority, and had you know, a similar experience to a lot of places just they went over budget, didn't produce enough units, they weren't of quality that people wanted, not in the right location. But what happened in Bangkok, and Thailand in general, was that you have to remember that for one thing. for about 10 years, it was the fastest growing economy in the world from like the mid 80s to the mid 90s. And what also happened during that time was that they really created this system that could produce a lot of housing by developers. So there were elements in which the regulations were by relative standards, pretty transparent, not very onerous. They developed a financial system that could finance developer built housing. And this all allowed them to just produce a whole lot of housing in the private market, that changed the urban landscape quite a bit. So it went from being you know, a place where you have lots of shop houses and a central city and enabled a lot of sprawl. So you got, you know, what looked like classic, you know, subdivisions further out on the periphery. And then later on, in there towards the 90s, really Bangkok really started to become condo land.

Shane Phillips 13:16
Before we get there, could you quickly define shophouses? Like what those look like?

Hayden Shelby 13:22
Oh, yeah, so shophouses they kind of look like row... I mean, you might think of them as row houses. The bottoms of them kind of have like, often like garage door openers or something where people run shops or they might just have like a shop on the bottom, literally, like there's a shop on the bottom, and then people get on top.

Shane Phillips 13:38
Got it okay,

Hayden Shelby 13:39
Yeah, yeah so what we what we would call mixed use in planning speak. Yeah so Bangkok was producing a lot of housing via this market system. The market was enabled producing a lot of housing. And in a first study that David Dahl along with, I believe Shlomo Angel, within the research at least, they found that, you know, this was, I think, as they put in an "efficiently performing housing market", that land prices weren't increasing that greatly. A lot was being produced, the production was starting to move down market. And the prediction was, I think that the, you know, slum, the sub population would start to become a smaller and smaller percentage of, of the overall population, until it was held up is this example in a lot of ways, and I think that paper came out in like 89 or

Shane Phillips 14:37
89, and there was a follow up in 92!

Hayden Shelby 14:40
In 92 yeah. And so in that just intervening few years, it's really interesting because he then comes in and the main my main takeaway from that paper is, "oh, actually, the land prices are increasing a lot now". And I think what that paper really is touching Is that Thailand or Bangkok in particular, was at the beginning of a huge housing bubble. And so, you know, fast forward into.. to condense a lot of very complicated stuff into a few sentences that that bubble, you know, entirely the economy is growing massively, people are pouring a lot of the money that's coming in into real estate. And in round 95, that bubble starts to burst, you start to see development companies going under. And this really pre-staged and you know, in 1997, eventually things getting bad condition, the government's forced to float the value of the baht, it collapses, and in July, we get what in Thailand is called "wicked tomyam goon", or the tomyam goon crisis, after the famous, you know, sour spicy soup, which is sort of a witty or at least a cheeky and self-deprecating way of saying what we call the East Asian financial crisis. So I think that period laid the foundation for a lot of the housing in Bangkok, in the intervening decades, there was obviously a slump, where there are a lot of like ghost towers in Bangkok. But in recent years, you are increasingly seeing, you know, Bangkok emerging as this aspirational, world-class city, there are a lot of condos being developed, still still some, you know, some sprawl and things like that. But I think from that the sort of high level of that of housing, that's what it looks like. But I think it's also important to note that some of the predictions of how, you know, this one population would, you know, maybe either be absorbed as the market went down market, or that they become a smaller proportion of urban population, that that did come true to a certain extent, but there was a very stubborn population in some settlements, around a million for several decades in there. And that history, if I haven't gone on too long already, I would love to give the history of what was actually going on in housing in those settlements.

Shane Phillips 17:24
No, I think that's really important context.

Paavo Monkkonen 17:26
Yeah, and I was curious, especially in terms of the land tenure of the, and how varied they are in the in the different settlements, because you know, in different countries slums, "slums", right, informal settlements arise, you know, because of invasions or because of sales or it's government land, and so that really can structure interventions as well.

Hayden Shelby 17:47
Yeah, yeah. So, and I should say, I do use the term slum in full recognition that it is a stigmatized term. I use it for a couple of reasons. The first is that some of the groups that I worked with in my research, use it themselves as a reappropriation, as a political identity. But also, you know, some of these settlements do kind of meet the UN criteria for what how they classify slum, and also some of the euphemisms for some like informal settlements don't necessarily always reflect the reality of how people occupy their land. So in Bangkok, what's kind of unique about Bangkok as opposed to places where you have like, you know, large-scale land invasions or places like you know, the Ravi in Mumbai, which are like cities within cities. Settlements in Bangkok are relatively dispersed throughout the city and throughout the urban region, with the exception of Khlong Toei which is a fairly large settlement. A lot of these settlements have anywhere from a couple of dozen households to a few 100. And there are several reasons for this. Some of it is the geography of Bangkok, a lot of the settlements are along canals and the canals have kind of woven throughout the city. Some is because some of the settlements actually were there before the city got to them.

Shane Phillips 19:14
As it expanded outward?

Hayden Shelby 19:15
Yeah, as the city expanded outward, and this is true even in like relatively central parts of the city, that the settlements were actually there before the main effort to issue land titles in Bangkok even happened; these settlements were there and kind of the people just weren't the ones who ended up with the titles. But a lot of times these settlements they happen with either like explicit written or sort of implicit permission of the landholder. So people will come in and maybe sometimes they pay a certain amount of rent, sometimes they have verbal or a little bit of written permission. It's really common to have settlements on temples or on different types of government land. So a lot of settlements are on, you know, the Crown Property Bureau, the State Railways of Thailand, the Treasury Department, these are all government entities that have a lot of settlements on their land. So I think that is the main sort of... if we're thinking about just the settlement patterns in Bangkok. And so that that means that people have varying types of legal claims to the land with varying levels of formality. Over time, some have gotten formal access to different types of utilities, water, and electricity, some haven't. Some have temporary housing registrations, some don't. So there's, there's a lot of variability in there.

Paavo Monkkonen 20:49
And I assume that implies variability in terms of the residents kind of socio economic status as well.

Hayden Shelby 20:55
Yeah, definitely. So you might have someone who has informal land tenure, but is like a government bureaucrat, and is like working, you know, has a formal job, has quite a bit of education. It's not at all uncommon to have people with college education. And in fact, some of the really successful communities that do Baan Mankong are, are successful, because they have educated people living among them.

Shane Phillips 21:25
Interesting. Your paper is about this Baan Mankong program or secure housing program. And it's responding to some specific gaps in what the public and private sector are providing. We've talked about sort of the the setting a little bit, but this program specifically, how does it work? What needs is it trying to address?

Hayden Shelby 21:46
Yeah, so in order to answer that, I have to go back a little bit, we need to get into some of what was going on in some slum communities throughout the 80s and 90s. And what kind of was the precursor to this. So you had in the, in the 80s, and 90s, with some of what was going on housing in lending, rising land prices, you had a lot of evictions going on. You had also communities that were really coming together and trying to fight evictions, some on their own and really gaining some strength and some ability...

Shane Phillips 22:23
Who is doing the evictions in this case, if there's not land titles involved?

Hayden Shelby 22:28
So a lot of these, it could be government agencies, that is less common than people who are private owners

Okay

it's really hard to achieve any type of either eviction delay, or you know, some of these, like land sharing types of agreements that I can talk about. It's a lot harder to do that with a private owner. They're harder to shame. They're not as politically accountable there, you have a lot more leverage when the land -owning agency is a government entity. But there was a lot of capacity that was being built in the settlements, and it was happening through the residents themselves. But it was also happening through the growth of non-governmental organizations of NGOs, which were being funded through efforts internationally to fund what was often thought of as good governance. Basically, meaning that, you know, in order to have a functioning democracy, you don't just want to like fund a central government, you want a whole civil society to be built up. So there was direct funding to NGOs. And in Thailand, this hit at a time when you had a lot of really idealistic young people, some of whom had really had cut their teeth and community-based work as student activists, some of whom were even, you know, in exile in the forest with the Communist Party of Thailand in the 70s, and then came back and started these organizations. And so when you get to the 80s, and the 90s, when some of the precursors to Baan Mankong were started, you had a lot of capacity there. So Baan Mankong itself, in terms of housing, what it's addressing is sort of the fact that the market never moved down market enough to house a lot of people who are living in these settlements, but also the government's efforts through the National Housing Authority to build what was like a lot of places, you know, it wasn't meeting the needs of people. And so what Baan Mankong attempts to do is through a huge conglomeration of entities that collaborate, it tries to bring communities together, gives them both financing, the development of new housing and communities, it gives them a means through which processes and assistance to negotiate legal forms of land tenure. And then in the process, and I think this is key for especially the people who are at the head of the organizations involved, It's not just about housing, you know, they are really trying to build up communities in order to do sometimes different things, depending on the organization we're talking about. But I think that is the needed - both about trying to get to do housing that is responsive to people's needs, but also about trying to really build up a civil society or people's sector, depending on how you talk about it.

Shane Phillips 25:45
Could you walk us through the process of forming these cooperatives? Because it's like a whole series of steps, it can be a high-level summary but I think it's important that we understand, and it explains how you end up with, you know, not just the housing side of things, but also these other financial supports.

Hayden Shelby 26:04
Yeah, and that's what really motivated my research project was that, you know, you have in a lot of literature out there, these high-level summaries, but then how does that actually happen. And it's a really onerous process. So communities or I should say settlements can come into Baan Mankong through a variety of means, sometimes it is because they are immediately being threatened with eviction, and they get kind of referred to start the process. Sometimes it's because you know, CODI or leaders have negotiated the possibility to do legal tenure on a government agency's land. And so the process of forming the communities then starts with that, you know, the possibility of getting tenure there. So there's not like that immediate threat of eviction there. But what everything has in common is that they have to form a concrete community, not just like a sense of community, not just like your neighbors, like they have to form this legal entity. And the way that they start to do that is through savings. So they have to save 10% collectively of what they intend to borrow. They can borrow up to, it started at 300,000 baht, it's been, you know, increasing

Shane Phillips 27:21
Which you said is about $15,000, USD

Hayden Shelby 27:25
10. Yeah, between 10 and 15, I'm not sure what it what the exchange rate would be right now. So they can borrow up to that amount, but they have to save that 10%. And once they've got that savings well underway, then the people who are involved then have to register as a cooperative in almost all cases. And that in and of itself has several steps, and there have more steps have been involved, as they've kind of realized that people need more education before they undertake this. And then once they have the cooperative, the cooperative is then the entity that borrows the money for the upgrading from CODI, which CODI charges, I believe it's still 4%. And then from the cooperative, the cooperative on lends to the individual households, they usually charge an additional couple of percent of interest. So it's a shared interest rate, and that interest covers the operating expenses and the different entities.

Shane Phillips 28:23
And that's important, because, correct me if I'm wrong, first, that's probably a better interest rate, than you could get otherwise. And second, you probably couldn't even get a loan in the first place. And

Hayden Shelby 28:36
that's its primary primarily the latter. I think it's I talked to a Cody leader, when when they were first starting to get this going and looking at trying to get formal lenders, like an asking what the interest rate would be like, well, it's a theoretical interest rate like they you just wouldn't get in. Yeah. So so yeah. So and it is subsidized. These are soft loans. This is obviously this is there there is the the interest rate is subsidized. And so that's actually that that sounds complicated enough, but that's actually the the neat and clean version of it. What actually happens is in the process of doing this, you you have to imagine you know what it's like to to think about putting your money together with your neighbors. And then not just that, but going into debt with people. There's an enormous amount of trust that has to be created between people. There's an enormous amount of internal politics that happens about who's going to lead it who's going to manage, and there's at the beginning stages, there's often a lot of turnover, people will say they're going to do it, they'll get started the pullout, as a cooperative starts to get up and going. Or especially as the savings group starts to get up and going people will be like, Okay, well I see this as happening, I guess, I guess I'll join. And then there there are cases where people might want to join but they you know, don't just don't have the ability to to put that kind of skin in the game. Yeah,

Shane Phillips 30:04
I mean, I think about, like, if I were just trying to buy a home with a couple friends, like the, the complexity of this already would already be, you know, like multiple people signing onto a mortgage. Like what happens if someone falls behind? Just doing that with one friend would be daunting. So to do this with

Hayden Shelby 30:23
upwards of 100? No, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is. And it's important to state that sometimes it is with people you barely know or don't know, what happens in two of the case studies that that I focus on. In one case, it was five different settlements came together, and or another, it was four. So it was this select group of people from settlements who were had, were threatened with immediate eviction. And there were only, you know, a dozen or you know, a couple of dozen people, or even just a handful, from these different settlements, who were all willing to do it, but none of them had a critical mass. And so either Cody staff or these NGO organizers, you know, facilitated them coming together. So in a lot of cases, those residents are actually taking this huge leap to become financially and eventually physically in space tied to people they don't know. And that that is that is a huge leap

Paavo Monkkonen 31:25
on this mechanic's question. So you have a group of houses next to each other, can some people participate? And some people not participate? And how does that eventually work out?

Hayden Shelby 31:34
That is like the million dollar question. I think, when when you're doing in situ, or in place upgrading, right. And I think what happens sometimes is, I know, in one of the my case study communities, they they have sort of divided the community, what they'll do is they'll divide the community into zones, and they'll say, okay, like, this zone is going to do it. And so sometimes that means that sometimes that means that okay, this other group of people are never going to do it. And we're just going to kind of like they're going to get pushed to the side. And sometimes that means that people really get pressured to join this there is there's an enormous amount of pressure. When you know, all the people around you are doing this and you're the holdout. Sometimes people are the holdouts, because they're the powerful people in the community. And they're like, Okay, well, maybe I can, you know, get some better terms or something. But, but yeah, I mean, it, when you're doing it in in place, it that is a really hard thing to get you there is a lot of pressure to get everybody on board,

Paavo Monkkonen 32:45
right. And there's no rule of I mean, because sometimes, like with redevelopment of multifamily buildings, if you get 90% of the people to agree, then it happens. In this case, I don't know if there's a rule rule like that, or the idea is that you would just try to get consensus. And if you can't, you know, I can you just imagine a lot of informal mechanisms of pressuring people, and then maybe even trying to kick people out or get new people into the neighborhood in order to make it all work.

Hayden Shelby 33:12
Yeah, I think I think it's like, so I don't know of any, like, 90% rule in this case, but I think like, of all the all the possibilities you just listed, like it's like, you know, all of the above and to different degrees in different charities. And yeah, like, there, there are mechanisms, through which, you know, in the case where you have people who really can't do the saving and can't do the financial things, that they can build a central house, that's one way that they can like pull people along who really like or whether they're disabled or elderly or something they fall on. But But yeah, there is there is a lot of pressure,

Paavo Monkkonen 33:46
and people can participate to different degrees. So you know, everyone doesn't have to be getting the same loan, or do they all have to get the same amount.

Hayden Shelby 33:54
So they don't all have to borrow the same amount. The, if people have, say a lot of materials from their existing houses that they want to use for reconstruction, if they're moving, or if they're just reblocking, they might not need they're just kind of like adjusting things and they just need materials. So so if they don't, if they don't need a ton of if they can substitute either with their own labor or with materials that they already have, they don't need to take out that much money. There are also generally more than one housing model that they're that they build in a community. Often it will be like, like a you know, a row house versus freestanding or a single storey or versus two storey and you know, they can they can borrow one will be less expensive and so they can borrow according to their need that way.

Paavo Monkkonen 34:44
But and so that's that was my next question, too, is there's my understanding is there's kind of a community agreed upon minimum quality level that all the new houses will have after

Hayden Shelby 34:55
Yeah, and so it's it's interesting and I think even some of the main Architects, like literally and figuratively architects of the policy from the beginning, I have in recent publications lamented that the designs of the houses have become more sort of cookie cutter. But

Paavo Monkkonen 35:14
I mean, it's cheaper though. So

Shane Phillips 35:17
a lot of cookies.

Hayden Shelby 35:19
It is, but but there is there is a set design that people have to agree to build to. And it's not just like a minimum standard by the community, because I think a lot of communities would agree to a much lower standard, like, they do have to like, you know, they have to meet building codes and things like that. Yeah. So that's often a big thing. But, but it's interesting, you know, I studied case studies, I specifically studied a couple that were older and who had gone through the process, and we're pretty much done. And then I said, the newer ones. And the older ones, if you talked to the leaders about the design process of making their houses, you know, they just light up. And I think, you know, Cody was really into making these participatory and using all kinds of materials and letting people kind of imagine their, you know, their new homes and the new futures. And the newer ones were kind of handed options. And the one the one community even, like the designs they were given didn't show where the door was, and they were, they were just like, No, like we and they and they started to find ways that they might hire, you know, another architect hurry to redo it. So yeah, so those are, those are some of the things that I think have have changed over time, along with the scale of the program. Yeah.

Shane Phillips 36:37
I'm curious, from the perspective of the government, what are they trying to achieve? Like, what are they getting out of this program?

Hayden Shelby 36:46
So it's, it's hard to talk about the Thai government? Well, for a number of reasons, it's politically hard. But also, you know, the government in so the face of this program is from the government and is Cody, Cody. Cody is often called a quasi governmental or parastatal, or things like that. But I think from the perspective of a lot of people I talked to, too, they are the government entity and a lot of really important ways. And so there's that I think, from higher levels of government, if we're talking about the landowning agencies, they are getting housing on this land that for one thing looks nicer. There is there is definitely a beautification aspect to this, particularly when you talk start talking about settlements along canals.

Paavo Monkkonen 37:40
Yeah, that's that was, you mentioned the canal to her and it often Yeah, poor quality housing in the past.

Hayden Shelby 37:45
Yeah, Bangkok is, was at one point, it has in multiple places throughout time been being called the Venice of the East. And that is definitely something that that they're trying to reclaim with some canal. But there's another side of the canal redevelopment, which is which, which is sort of climate change related in 2011. There were massive floods. Now, the reasons for those were quite political as to you know, what, what measures were taken to prevent which areas from flooding versus not flooding. But that's one of the, you know, one of the reasons that some of the especially a new version of this is taking place. So I think that's that's part of it. And the other is that, you know, it is it is in the interest of a government of a state to have people housed well, for all kinds of reasons. And this is a way yes, there are subsidies involved. There are grants for infrastructure, and other things there are, the interest rates are subsidized, but a whole lot of the cost is being shared by communities themselves, it is a very cost effective way to create housing.

Shane Phillips 38:58
Yeah, yeah. And you make a point here that, you know, maybe this is more the appeal to the residents, but there's this element of sort of legitimating them or formalizing them bringing them into the formal economy, which I think is a benefit both to the residents and the government itself. I think they would see that as a goal of theirs as well. Yeah, I

Hayden Shelby 39:19
mean, be being able to, like count people, and also for the rest of this being counted, though, those are goals that both sets of people can have.

Paavo Monkkonen 39:29
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that kind of multiple goals it's trying to achieve, as, but that's something that is very common in housing policy, right, especially, kind of when dealing with, quote, unquote, slum areas. And I think, you know, for people that haven't looked into this area of research or kind of policy inquiry before, you know, thinking about this, compared to other ways governments try to deal with a neighborhood on the side of a canal with poor housing conditions, right. And you think about like government resettlement programs, and public housing as like, being maybe the the least successful version. And so some form of community involved, redevelopment is generally kind of what works the best. But it's it's just complicated, right? There's a lot of yeah, there's a lot of issues you have to deal with.

Hayden Shelby 40:16
Yeah, it's complicated. And especially, you know, there's a lot of what I, what I emphasize. And what I'm trying to push back in this article is that I think a lot of the literature around this and similar models has been on the potential empowering impacts of collective finance, that by offering people the chance to manage finances, collectively, to create resources, that this is like a catalyst of community empowerment, and of communities being able to, you know, participate politically, because they have more financial resources, or it's like the glue that keeps people together. And, and I, I want to push back against that, because I think that there are aspects of this program, especially when people are connected with other communities, and especially when they they come together to, you know, fight or stave off eviction, or when they work with wider networks to push for policy changes, there are aspects of this that can that are really empowering, and what I have seen of how people go about managing these collective assets and debts. It's complicated, it's stressful, it puts them in positions relative to their neighbors that they may not want to be in. And so and, and it is like, we have to recognize that even if this may be is better than relocation to, you know, some public housing far away from their original land, they are taking on the finding some of the financial burden, and and there is pressure, it is in multiple people's interest for them to do that. Right.

Shane Phillips 41:57
Yeah, I think you you see some of that same motivation here in the US with things like community land Trust's and tenant opportunity to purchase programs, these kinds of things you started to get at this just a moment ago, in the paper, you set up what I think is a really important contrast between empowerment and responsibility nation, could you explain that distinction for our listeners, maybe kind of talk about how that manifests in this program.

Hayden Shelby 42:26
So I think we often think of empowerment as like, maybe, you know, this is a slippery term, and it's, it gets especially slippery, because it gets it gets applied to this program, even though there's not a great translation in Thai for it, which is kind of funny. But you know, empowerment, it, I think of is like increasing your ability to do something and saying, like, you can do this, or we can do this. And then when something slips into responsible innovation, it's like, oh, we have to do, right. So so the program isn't just allowing people to do certain things, including and especially the management of financings, it is requiring them to do

Shane Phillips 43:06
it, it's like their only path to doing this.

Hayden Shelby 43:09
Yeah, and and it's only passive path to doing this particular thing. And also, we have to recognize that, you know, people aren't, this is a voluntary program, and at the end of the day, but people are when they choose to do this program, they are operating within a very circumscribed set of choices. And so that's where I think responsible innovation comes into play is that, you know, that they're they're doing this program, and they are taking on a lot of risk for themselves, sometimes for in the case of leaders for their community members. And then often I in in, in cases where the development is really being pushed from, you know, any number of state agencies.

Paavo Monkkonen 44:02
What I just on that I was, I was wondering what you thought about I mean, a counterfactual would be a similar program, but without the community part. And instead, just each person would have a direct relationship for each household with a government agency that was doing this similar kind of lending. I guess. We're entering it to grow speculation here. But how do you think that would change the way this works? Or even I was thinking, you know, might be in a better situation, give communities the option of doing it through a community cooperative, or one on one with the government. Right?

Hayden Shelby 44:35
Yeah. So it's hard to speculate. I think that some people might prefer that, but it's important to realize, well, so a couple points. One is that the finance works in part, because the risk is reduced because you are relying on people's social capital. To ensure repayment, you are relying on social pressure that is in a sense, sort of collateralizing people's social capital. That is one of the reasons that the finance works.

Paavo Monkkonen 45:07
The community pressure subsidy.

Shane Phillips 45:09
Yes, yes. Whereas if it was just you in a relationship with the government, if you walked away, that would be between you and the government, no one's really gonna

Paavo Monkkonen 45:18
ENOVIA it'd be harder for them to, it'd be harder for them to go after you. Yeah, it's politically tenable. Yeah.

Hayden Shelby 45:23
And I know, in one of my case studies, there is a house that someone just walked away from, like, it still happens. But I think it's also important to think about why why collective tenure. And this gets to a couple of things. First, is just the the debates around titling. And so one of the, one of the reasons that Baan Mankong, I think, is and this model is popular is that for, for a while, there was this idea that, you know, famously associated with Hernando Desoto, that, like all people needed in these informal environments was like an individual title. And that would, you know, awaken dead capital, and they would have these financial resources and be pulled into the formal market. And that got critiqued both both logically and with some evidence that, you know, when you give somebody an individual title, now that the increased value that that, that that brings to that land into that house will actually if the person is very poor, the value of that new asset will be greater to them than the value of that place as a home and they'll sell and basically be displaced by market forces. So that's one of the motivations for having this be a collective thing. But I mean, I think beyond that, and and the reason I say like I remained, despite my critique sympathetic to this program, and others like it is, is that it is like, it's this way of imagining a way of being in the city outside of private property. You know, you can call it the commons, you can call it what you like, but it but I like said like, it's, you know, housing policies are rarely about housing, and especially these type of collective housing policies. They're, they're not just about producing housing, they're about producing different different ways of life, different different ways of being in the city. So I think that's, even though I think that I, I think you are correct, that there are probably there are probably actually lots of people going through this program, who would say like, can you just give me alone? Can I just do this on my own? I think it on the financial side there are that people would people would object to that. But then also, I think, at least from the higher levels of the people running, running the organizations involved, that wouldn't like meet the goals, and it wouldn't have the government backing, because like, the community aspect is actually also a really big part of why people hire in the government like really like this.

Paavo Monkkonen 47:54
Yeah, I mean, I that really brings up a side tangent that I won't get into, but about how can have lower income communities in slums are forced to do this, but then rich communities aren't. But what I didn't want,

Shane Phillips 48:06
I think that is worth talking about. But that's yeah, I'm interested in is this idea of

Paavo Monkkonen 48:12
like, I don't know, like paternalistic community empowerment.

Shane Phillips 48:17
Maybe it's like the distinction between the collective aspect of this and the participatory aspect of it. Like those aren't necessarily the same thing. And the participatory part maybe seems like the bigger burden, and it's also an opportunity for many people. But it's sort of like forcing everyone to be part of an HOA, and like, HOA fees are famously terrible. And but some people are really into it, because they like leading an HOA and being that person, but those of us who have been, you know, part of a volunteer organization or an HOA or whatever, know that the person who like speaks up and wants to lead is not necessarily the most competent person all the time. So I'm just saying, I just don't know, like, it's, I think your point POB about like, having the option for people. If you could do that without forcing it would be ideal, but you know, hated your point about how you kind of lose that social pressure, maybe? I'm not sure you can totally cleave away the collective part from the party support. That's already they seem, you know, kind of overlapping. Yes.

Hayden Shelby 49:23
Yeah. And, and yeah, I have thought about this a lot. And I think at the end of the day, you know, I, I come away from this particular program, and I think a lot of you know, whether we're thinking about community land trusts, or limited equity coops, thinking that, you know, I think they're a really I think they're a really great option for some people. Right. I think in where you have to understand that about Baan Makong is it has always purported to be the scalable version of all of this like the the initial, it has never reached. The initial projections I wanted for the first five years, but it's reached, you know, 113,000 households, I think as of the most recent report much higher if you consider some of the sister programs, it's important

Shane Phillips 50:11
context, we didn't share. Yeah, huge program, its

Hayden Shelby 50:15
programs or something. And the ambitions in the next 20 years are to grow it, like four or five fold. But I think and this, this idea is not mine, I have to I have to credit, Eli Ellen off with this who, who has also studied, not Baan Makong, per se, but has done some really excellent research that involves about sort of local democracy and the politics of citizenship that takes place in a community going through Baan Makong, is that, you know, this collective aspect, it creates this form of differentiated citizenship. You know, if we conceive of different ways of having rights in the city of being associated with property, you have, you know, wealthier people who can who can do all these things on their own. But poor people can only do it collectively. And there's this, you know, he has a great a great quote, and his his book, which I will plug with citizen designs came out this year with university fire press, where one of the people who's going through it is thinking about, you know, not doing it and says they want to, like upgrade their status to be an individual. That's like, their ambition in life. And yeah, like, I think people, people feel that and even even some of the organizers who have more radical ideals around that the communities that are associated with that, you know, people people feel a great deal of ambivalence.

Paavo Monkkonen 51:42
Yeah. Yeah. And so where I wanted to go before that useful tangent was, was very much connected to this, and it's the the limited equity part of this, right? Because you could have the same program, but at the end of the process, you're allowed to sell it on the market. Right? And that would that would make everything work probably differently. In this case, you can, right. So when my understanding correctly, that if you want to move you can sell but at a price that the collective determines? And yeah, do people do that? And what are those prices? Generally? Like?

Hayden Shelby 52:15
Yeah, I am a little limited in how much I can speak to this. So I, I know, in the sort of bylaws of a court of cooperatives that I've looked at, there isn't like how you might have any community land trust, like a set, you know, formula for this, that it really is, you know, it's determined by it by a vote. And by the by the committee and by the collective, I think the ambition of a lot of people, at least at the high level, is that this is like a more permanent way that of being together. But I think when when the when the loans are paid off their 15 year terms, to my knowledge, they have the option of dissolving the cooperative.

Shane Phillips 53:00
Yeah, I was curious about that, like once, like, if you were to sell, does the buyer take on some kind of special responsibilities to the collective? Or is it like, if the loan is paid, you're kind of you can wash your hands of it, and just kind of live your life.

Hayden Shelby 53:14
So they would, if they did that, they would, they would have to, you know, split the deed individually. This is like I, you know, maybe maybe other people know, more, more more details about this than I do. But when I finished my fieldwork, which was in 2018, that was exactly 15 years after Baan Makong started in earnest 2003. Now, some pilot programs were before that. So there were some communities as I was there that were kind of coming, coming to the end of their repayment period. And I'm not entirely sure none of them were I didn't do case studies of any of them. But I think and probably, you know, well, maybe not by now, because COVID has, you know, that Cody did pause repayments for COVID reasons. So, but I think like from from now, in the next few years, there are going to be a lot of communities that are coming to the end of their repayment periods. And it's an open question as to what they do, whether they choose to stay together, whether they, you know, choose to split their deeds, but but there's not the that in tension, at least in this program. Like I believe in the community mortgage program in the Philippines, it's like, it's like the intention of the program to my understanding that they're going to individualize the titles. That is that is not like, set here.

Shane Phillips 54:33
I mean, on this on the, you know, limited sales prices. I know, we don't have all the details on this, but I was thinking about this as well, where like, again, thinking about a US context, something like a community land trust, that always entails some kind of public funding and usually pretty substantial funding where it's, you know, the homes are purchased, and because grants were involved the price of the unit itself. For less than it otherwise would to, you know, lower moderate income buyer. And they can only sell it at a, you know, slightly inflated rate rather than the market price. And that makes sense because it was public money and they want to get the most out of it that they can, this is a little different where there is the subsidy on like the interest rate, maybe, and maybe they're eating some losses on loans that don't get paid back. But like, it is largely shouldered by the households themselves. And these are pretty poor households mostly. And so on the one hand, they're shouldering all the risk, or much of the risk, but the upside is really limited. And so they can't just like, sell if they've been successful. It just seems like I mean, a great deal for, for the government anyway, for Bangkok to like, have have put all this responsibility on on these these households and settlements. And yet, if it fails, it's really on on those households as well. But if it succeeds, like that's future, you know, high quality housing, and it's and it's affordable, and all these positive things that benefit society kind of more broadly.

Hayden Shelby 56:07
Yeah, I have really kind of mixed feelings about this on I think, and I think a lot of I think that's because the people I saw going through the process sometimes have have mixed feelings about this. I think that, you know, I think for one that I you know, I didn't see this in any of my case, study communities, but I know it has been a concern among like, Cody staff and other observers, I talk to you that, you know, informally, people are kind of selling and getting some kind of profit off, and they can get some kind of profit, like the price agreed to can be like, you know, give them something.

Shane Phillips 56:42
Well, it does seem, I mean, a 15 year term, people move a lot like, yeah, for everyone to commit to living there for 15 years, at least, to see. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Hayden Shelby 56:50
And people people do get replaced. And one of the challenges and one of the reasons and this did happen, I think, in one of my communities where they, you know, people people leave, basically get kicked out, because they fall behind, like in theirs. But when they want someone to come in, they need somebody then who can like make up those payments, who so that necessarily means that a wealthier person is coming in. Yeah, but I think too, it's it's important to realize, what people are investing in, is not it is it is a status it is it is a nicer house, that is important to some people. And I you know, I have this very distinct memory from field work where I was, I was talking to one of the leaders of a community and she was she was not having a good day. You know, people were not paying, she was trying to enforce late fees. People were upset with her. And, and I asked her, you know, why, why are you doing this? And this was in her, you know, her this was pre evictions, she was in her, you know, kind of wooden self built house on Canal and then she just gestured to her daughter's and she said for them, and and that was that was enough for her because after, you know, after 15 years, you know, it's it's there's, you know, there there's a place there's a there's a safe, steady place to live. And I think I think it is important it was interesting I on a totally other note, I was recently reading the most recent Cody annual report and, and they are trying to kind of, I don't know if this is just to like drum up support, but But trying to come up with like the actual value that has accrued to some of the some of the land and and potentially some of the people. So I think there are movements in that direction, too. But I think people you know, people people do this for non non monetary reasons.

Shane Phillips 58:44
Well, I think we're just about out of time here. But is there anything we missed? I know, we had even more questions in our in our list. So there's just so much to cover. But is there anything like G you wanted to talk about before we go?

Hayden Shelby 58:57
Yeah, well, I guess, I think we had to close it up. I, when it comes down to it the way I've been thinking about, you know, the this program and community led processes. You know, a lot of people can look at these sorts of things and see their politics reflected back at them. You know, from the left, this looks like, you know, an alternative to the market from you know, other positions, it looks like an alternative to st provision. And I think my my concern is that in this paper, at least is when when we celebrate sort of the community managed finance part we start to celebrate it going away at that it becoming that that sort of that that alternative to the state part. And I think when we look at these types of programs we need to ask ourselves is is participating in them acting as a way of people demanding more resources from the state of really gaining collective power? Or is it is it acting as a substitute for redistribution of resources? And I think sometimes you can't tell the The answer to that just by looking at a model, you have to see how it's playing out on the ground. You have

Shane Phillips 1:00:05
a you have a quote that I made a note of about how this blurs the boundaries between radical alternatives to the market and neoliberal alternatives to the state, which I think is a really, like, astute way of putting this. For the last question. I, we usually ask this, but I'm especially interested this time, because you were in Bangkok for years, but now you're back. What's next for you?

Hayden Shelby 1:00:29
Oh, the the future of research on this in particular is is quite up in the air and COVID You know, making this this sort of thing especially difficult, but, you know, I'm in I'm in Cincinnati, now I'm back in the US. And, and I am, I am still really interested in these collective ways of holding land. And so, you know, I did presented a paper at a conference in the fall, kind of doing a lit review and looking at different models of collective tenure around the world and thinking about, you know, how they're the same, how they're different how they're in conversation with one another. So I'm interested in thinking about the implications of, of different institutional arrangements on these things, but, but I'm also really interested in collective tenure as traveling policy, and the ways in which people are sharing knowledge about it, and how, what it is that we choose to be the things that are replicable, and whether those are the right things. So that I think that's, that's, that's definitely one answer as well, where I'm going as well, as, you know, getting getting involved in housing stuff in Cincinnati and understanding what's going on here.

Paavo Monkkonen 1:01:43
Yeah, and can I just jump in and say, more than most of the papers, I'd highly recommend reading this one, because there is a lot that we didn't get into. I mean, we didn't even talk about the patriarchy element and the gender nature of work. And then the whole policy mobility stuff you just brought up about how this became a model that other countries are trying to adopt and the aging Coalition for housing rights, trying to trying to export so I think I would recommend listeners, go check out the paper.

Hayden Shelby 1:02:09
Thank you very much, and I recommend the podcast.

Shane Phillips 1:02:13
Hayden Shelby, thanks for being on the show.

Hayden Shelby 1:02:16
Thank you very much. Thanks.

Shane Phillips 1:02:22
You can read more about Professor Shelby's research and find our show notes and a transcript of the interview at our website lewis.ucla.edu. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @ShaneDPhillips. And Paavo is there at @elpaavo. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

About the Guest Speaker(s)

Hayden Shelby

Hayden Shebly is an assistant professor in the School of Planning in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati.
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