Housing rights and evictions

Five shouting protesters on 19 January morning shut down a meeting of the joint committee for housing solutions in Borei Keila before it could sign cash compensation deals with 56 evicted families. After a long and contentious land dispute, 56 families were set to sign contracts that ...

A collection of houses and other structures belonging to nine families living alongside a canal in the capital’s Russey Keo district was destroyed on 18 January by a large group of men sent by local authorities. The Beung Salang villagers had been previously told to vacate a ...

Tent-dwellers on the banks of the Ayeyarwady River in Mandalay may soon be exchanging their canvas walls for bricks and mortar, as the regional government seeks tenants for newly completed low-cost housing. The Mandalay Region government has decided not to charge would-be tenants a deposit amounting ...

Pyin Oo Lwin officials are cracking down on forest dwellers squatting near a road construction site alongside the city’s only water supply. The township’s Department of Environmental Conservation and Forestry blamed the squatters around Lake Thit Ta Pin Taung for causing forest degradation by lighting forest ...

Families living in huts on the bank of the Ayeyarwady River will soon be able to rent affordable housing from the city, officials say. Twenty-two six-storey housing blocks containing 1584 apartments have been built in nearby Nyaung Kwe ward in Aung Myay Thar San township. The ...

More than 160 families in Kratie province’s Snuol district have alleged that the Memot Rubber Plantation company has been using excavators to clear their land. The families from Pi Thnou commune filed a complaint to the provincial office of local rights group Adhoc on 23 December, ...

The government is failing to enforce, or even make landlords and tenants aware of, the new rent-control law, even as rents begin to creep up in anticipation of garment workers receiving their annual wage raise next month, labour advocates say. The legislation, which went into effect ...

People duped into buying government-owned land beside the Yangon-Mandalay Highway on 17 December urged police to take action against those responsible, shortly after the authorities moved in and evicted thousands from the Hlegu site. More than 1600 acres had been subdivided and sold in 2400-square-foot plots since ...

Already tired of lengthy delays on the promised return of confiscated land, farmers in Pyin Oo Lwin district are now furious officials stood them up at a negotiation meeting. The farmers said they were summoned by the Township Farmland Management and Statistics Department to discuss a ...

The organiser of a protest by community members who face eviction from their homes to make way for a railway project in Banteay Meanchey province was detained on 14 December after demonstrators burned an effigy and dragged its decapitated body through the streets. About 50 protesters marched ...