This House Will Make You Rich

“But we don’t want to be poor!” demands a thin old lady; her hand is shaking nervously. “We want houses that will make us rich.”

In Thailand, there’s a traditional religious ritual that comes with new houses. When people moved into new houses, monks would be summoned – at high cost - to the house opening ceremony; then they would chant sacred intonation so that the new owners would feel reassured that their houses are now blessed with fortune.

Today, in a hyperactive urban lifestyle, most people have no money (nor time) to pay for the monks’ blessing; so the new house owner or the new slum dweller would just paste a big sticker on his front door:

“This house will make you rich!” It’s a new secular trend among urban dwellers; much to the disapproval of the monks.

The government still doesn’t seem to understand the hybrid nature of housing and income generation. In Thailand, most public housing for the urban poor are required to be “residential only.” This legal binding prevents many prospective entrepreneurs from rising above the poverty level.

The “residential only” clause has a strange logical implication in Bangkok. After all, 60% of the economy is embedded in the informal sector. Bangkok is a city of micro-entrepreneurs. Yet the government policy for the poor doesn’t seem to allow for housing types that could generate income. The lack of jobs and income are the twain problems that are causing the growth of squatter settlement and slums.

Typical Shophouses in Bangkok: The owners would add shops and additional stories overtime (There are a few instances where the structural foundation gave way; resulting in "leaning" shophouses)

In the late 80s, architect Antonio Ismael Risianto asked the slums dwellers in Indonesia: What do you want first, housing or jobs? They said they want jobs. So as the project architect working in the service of thousands of slum dwellers, he started by drawing a big bazaar on a piece of yellow tracing paper.

“The bazaar comes first,” he said. “Then we could position the housing around it. This way, there’s less incentive for people to sell their housing titles.” Antonio later received the prestigious Aga Khan Award for successfully executing this very simple idea.

Antonio said that in Indonesia, most mass housing projects had individualized titles. “Anyone who has that title could sell it out at market rate,” he observed. So one strategy to prevent neighborhood gentrification is to create a place where jobs are available nearby.

Samarinda Housing/Market Master Plan: Antonio Ismael Risianto, (Architect)

In Bangkok, most public housing projects in the past 50 years also have individualized private titles; so they usually ended up in the hands of the speculators. Recently, in 2003 however, the government had introduced the concept of “collective housing” titles. Under the collective housing, the community must share a saving group together with a collective land deed – they must form a cooperative in order to be eligible for the program. The idea is to promote some degree of financial autonomy and to prevent individual owners from selling their housing titles to outside speculators.

However, there are still some old relics from the past that have yet to be ironed out. Under the Collective Housing program (public funding), you are still not allowed to add a commercial component to it; the state funding had made a restriction that any publicly funded housing estate must have “residential use for the poor only.” So the job generating component – the retail and commercial shophouses – could not be build into these projects, or even if they are built, it has to be done so discreetly.

Most co-ops have strict regulation that the members who want to get out of the project have to sell their house/land back to the co-op. However, there are few instances where the buyers actually approach the co-op committee members; they offer very high price. A co-op in Chantaburi province was offered 70 million baht, but the committee immediately rejected the offer. These commercial proposals give us a glimpse of what could happen if the co-op commitee is not strong enough to reject such lucrative offers.

Legal means could do little to prevent the selling and buying of housing titles. The surest way to prevent this form of transaction from happening is to have secure jobs in the area. Usually, most communities that have joined the collective housing program are staying and upgrading their houses in the same place – perhaps with a higher density. So the problem of living near the source of jobs is automatically being taken care of since most people would be working at the same types of jobs they did before.

But a better solution is to design housing that provides even more job opportunities for its residences. Providing jobs to the community is a better safety net in ensuring that the poor will not sell their rights and become a squatter elsewhere.

Traditional cities - like Madras and Calcutta - grew out of trading port; so did Buffalo New York, and Singapore. Cities grew out of communities and communities grew out of business transactions – jobs. In the case of Buffalo, when the port was abandoned, the city started to decay.

Today the city of Buffalo, when viewed from the 2nd floor up, is still full of grand Art Deco Buildings wrapped with the finest marble and copper plaques bearing the name of famous architects who designed them. But on the ground floor, we see fine hotel lobbies giving ways to pornography shops and liquor stores.

Policy makers must understand that jobs and housing are inseparable and public funds for housing should be more flexible. They should carefully read the stickers that are glued to the entry doors in the slums: "This House Will Make You Rich"