In recent years, impoverished families in Bangkok, Thailand have turned disused, deteriorating airplanes into makeshift homes.
Families like these often gather trash and recycling, which they can sell for a couple dollars a day, in order to get by. But that’s certainly not enough to pay rent, so they remain on the outskirts of society, living in ruins.
That said, according to The World Bank and the United Nations, Thailand is one of recent history’s great success stories in terms of economic growth and poverty eradication. In fact, the country went from a low-income one to a high-income one in less than a generation as the national poverty rate fell from 67 percent in 1986 to just 11 percent in 2014.
Nevertheless, there may still be as many as approximately 7 million impoverished people in Bangkok, many of whom are likely still reeling from Asia’s financial crisis of the early 2000s. And some of those desperate people are the ones who have now ventured into the city’s airplane graveyard, and taken refuge inside some rather unlikely homes.
Next, check out the tiny homes that artist Gregory Kloehn built to fight homelessness. Then, step inside seven tiny homes that prove size doesn’t matter.
