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'We Were Never Consulted': Bangkok's Displaced Residents Speak Out on the City's Building Boom
From Khlong Toei to the Chao Phraya riverfront, communities facing eviction say urban planners are treating them as an afterthought in a city remaking itself for tourists and investors.
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Residents of at least three Bangkok neighbourhoods slated for redevelopment under the city's revised Comprehensive Plan 2023 say they received no meaningful warning before demolition notices appeared on their doors. The plan, which rezones significant stretches of riverside and inner-city land from low-density residential to commercial and mixed-use, took legal effect in late 2024, but many of the people living inside the affected zones say they only learned the details this year, as bulldozers moved into adjacent blocks.
The timing is not accidental. Bangkok's tourism sector logged a record 22.8 million international arrivals in 2025, and city hall has been under sustained pressure from real estate developers to accelerate infrastructure upgrades along the Chao Phraya waterfront. The Paetongtarn Shinawatra government in turn has pointed to riverside beautification as proof of economic momentum. For the families living in wooden shophouses on Charoen Krung Road or the long-established communities behind Wat Yannawa in Sathon district, that momentum has a harder edge.
Khlong Toei and Charoen Krung: Two Fronts, One Argument
Khlong Toei remains Bangkok's largest slum community, roughly 100,000 people packed into a 1.2-square-kilometre triangle of Port Authority of Thailand land. The PAT has held the threat of redevelopment over Khlong Toei for decades, but residents' groups say the pace of formal notices accelerated sharply after January 2026, when the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration approved a memorandum of understanding with a consortium of private developers to study a "logistics and hospitality hub" on the port land. The Four Regions Slum Network, which has organised communities across Thailand since the 1990s, says it has documented 47 households in Khlong Toei that received eviction paperwork in the first quarter of this year alone.
On Charoen Krung, the tension takes a different form. The strip between the Oriental Hotel pier and the Icon Siam shopping complex has become a target for high-rise condominium developers, drawn by new Floor-Area-Ratio allowances in the revised zoning code. Small shophouse owners, many of them third-generation Chinese-Thai families running print shops, hardware stores and noodle stalls, say heritage protection rules that were supposed to shield the old town character of Charoen Krung Sois 32 to 42 have been quietly watered down in the implementation guidelines. The Bangkok Old Town Heritage Trust, a civil society group that has lobbied the BMA since 2019, says it has filed three formal objections since March 2026, none of which has received a written response within the legally required 30-day window.
What the Numbers Say, and Who They Leave Out
National Housing Authority data published in May 2026 shows the median price of a 30-square-metre condominium unit within 500 metres of a BTS Skytrain station now stands at 3.2 million baht, a 38 percent increase since 2020. The government's own affordable housing scheme, the Baan Eua Arthorn programme, has produced fewer than 8,000 units in Greater Bangkok over the past five years against a stated target of 40,000. Advocacy groups argue the gap between supply and demand is driving working-class families further toward the periphery, into areas like Min Buri and Nong Chok, where commute times routinely exceed 90 minutes each way on public transport.
The BMA has pointed to a 2025 pilot project in Din Daeng, where the National Housing Authority is redeveloping three aging tower blocks into a mixed-income complex with 1,400 units, as evidence that on-site rehousing is possible. Residents' groups counter that Din Daeng families waited up to nine years in temporary accommodation before the replacement units were handed over, and that rents in the new development start at 3,500 baht per month, beyond the reach of the lowest-income tenants who lived there originally.
Community organisers from the Four Regions Slum Network plan to submit a petition to the BMA's Urban Planning Division by July 15, demanding an independent review of the comprehensive plan's implementation and a moratorium on evictions pending that review. Whether city hall agrees to meet them will tell residents a great deal about which version of Bangkok the current administration is actually building, and for whom.