In this more socialist style housing system, ready-built housing units (mostly in the form of blocks of flats or small row-houses) have been developed by the state and rented out to people, usually on a subsidized basis, making the government a supplier of housing.  

In Asia we find this housing delivery system mainly in Singapore (where 95% of the housing stock is state-built!) and Hong Kong (where the proportion of public housing stock is fast diminishing).  

Thailand's stock of public rental housing, developed by the National Housing Authority, between the 1950s and 1980s, amounts to only between 4% and 7% of the total number of formal housing units in urban areas.

2.  
Market sector housing 

In this housing delivery system, private entrepreneurs design and develop housing projects (in many forms, ranging from individual houses to condos to blocks of flats) and sell or rent those units at rates which allow them to meet their development costs and turn a profit.  

This system, which looks at housing not as an essential human need, but as a commodity, is the predominant housing delivery today in Thailand, as in most Asian countries, where the prevailing pro-business systems of finance and governance offer many incentives to develop these kinds of profit-making projects.  
But despite publicity to the contrary, this sector has been unable to reach the poorest 30% of Asia's urbanites.

  In this housing delivery system, which is becoming rarer and rarer these days, individual families construct their own housing, on land which they've bought themselves or been granted, instead of buying it ready-made from the real estate developers.  
A few decades ago, between 60% and 70% of the houses in Bangkok were built by the families which occupied them.  

Building your own wooden house (or hiring a good carpenter to build it for you) was for centuries the "Thai way" when it came to housing, and it produced an astonishing richness and variety in the country's built environment.  

 

Housing which is planned, financed and developed by groups of people is not just for the poor!  
In countries like Denmark, you still find highly sophisticated cooperative housing projects being developed by groups of urban families who decide against living in isolated houses or apartments, and choose instead to join with others to plan a new community and to develop their new housing as a group.  

This housing delivery system works best in situations where there are financial arrangements to finance them, legal instruments to give some legal status to the groups which develop them, and some tradition of communal organization to support the process.  
Most of the housing projects which CODI has financed during the 1990s and early 2000s have been developed along these lines, by registered community cooperatives.

  This brand new housing delivery system is having its debut in the Baan Mankong Program.  
In this system, communities within a given constituency link together, survey their housing problems as a group, and then enter into a collaborative process with their municipal governments and with other concerned organizations in the city to jointly develop a plan which resolves those problems and which allows all those communities to be developed, with government finance and support.   |
The form that development takes in each individual community is flexible, and could involve in situ upgrading, shifting to nearby land, land sharing or reblocking.  
More important than the form is the fact that the housing plan covers all the settlements, and comes out of a process in which all the local stakeholders look at the situation and plan together. 

Go To Baan Mankong Guide