Soaring housing prices and political squabbling in Turkey’s largest city are hampering efforts to rebuild unstable homes.
“We looked a lot for a newer apartment in the same area, but it was impossible to find one we could afford,” he said. Faced with the prospect of tripling their rent, they ended up settling for a neighborhood some 20 miles (32 kilometers) away.
Millions of Istanbul residents are now in a similar situation, having to potentially choose between endangering their lives or their financial security. Experts believe that approximately 200,000 buildings in Turkey’s largest city would sustain at least moderate damage in the event of a severe earthquake — and nearly half of those are considered high-risk.
Meanwhile, house prices in Istanbul have shot up 138% over the past year amid an ongoing nationwide cost-of-living crisis, something that’s featured prominently in the runup to Sunday’s elections as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seeks to extend his 21-year-rule. The property market inflation is compounding the difficulty of addressing what critics describe as decades of neglect when it comes to the city’s disaster readiness.
“There is consensus among experts that there will be an earthquake in Istanbul and it will be a strong one, with devastating consequences for the entire region and beyond,” said Fuat Keyman, director of the Istanbul Policy Center at the city’s Sabancı University. “But we still find ourselves in a situation where the city is not prepared.”
A rogues’ gallery of the types of bad building practices that threaten Istanbul’s 16 million residents sits on a table in an office in the Kadıköy district, where civil engineer Günday Mazlum works at a concrete and subsoil testing facility run by the local municipality. He points out seashells, foam chunks, even wadded-up newspapers embedded in tubes of concrete extracted from buildings that were later demolished. Other samples have less obvious flaws, but are just as dangerous.
“Builders may cut corners by not using enough aggregate or cement, or by using too much water,” explains Mazlum. He compares it to making poğaça, a buttery, biscuit-like bread roll: “If you use too much liquid, the dough will fall apart when you bake it.”
An estimated 70 percent of Istanbul’s building stock was constructed before 2000, when stricter codes were put into place following the 1999 quake in the neighboring province of Kocaeli, which killed at least 17,000 people. But even after 2000, the new standards have not always been consistently applied or enforced, as was seen to devastating effect three months ago when massive earthquakes killed more than 50,000 people in the country’s southeast.
Applications to have vulnerable housing units in Istanbul torn down and rebuilt have tripled since then, reaching nearly 500,000, according to Ali Kurt, the general manager of Kiptaş, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s housing agency. “We are offering the work at cost, negotiating with the financial institutions and contractors on behalf of the homeowners, and offering stable installments for payment,” Kurt said. But many people are still unable to afford the associated expenses, and getting final approval from a majority of apartment owners for such projects has been challenging. As a result, just 1,800 demolitions have taken place so far.
Muray Güney, an independent social scientist and urban researcher who previously worked for the municipality-affiliated Istanbul Planning Agency, praised the work that Kiptaş does but noted that “as a municipal institution, it doesn’t have the financial or political power to transform all of Istanbul’s high-risk buildings.” He estimates that rebuilding the roughly 90,000 highest-risk structures would require a budget of around $20 billion.
“Financing is one of our biggest weaknesses,” Kurt agreed. “We could offer much more beneficial terms and move more quickly if we had cooperation from the state.”
An ongoing political rivalry between the central government and the opposition-run Istanbul municipality has diminished prospects of cooperation between the two sides. Last month, Erdoğan’s government announced its own project to shore up Istanbul’s fragile housing stock. Under this plan, 500,000 high-risk units will be razed and rebuilt, while an additional 1 million at-risk households will be relocated to two planned “satellite cities” that will be built on previously undeveloped state-controlled lands within greater Istanbul.
Costs will be split between the state and homeowners, who can apply to participate through a lottery system open until May 29, the day after a potential run-off in the presidential election between Erdoğan and main rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Ayşe Köse Badur, who coordinates projects on local democracy and governance at the Istanbul Policy Center, worries about the fallout from a continued standoff between Istanbul officials and the national government.
“The political dispute means that if people want to have their building checked, they have to decide, to whom should I apply?” said Badur. “This kind of competition is harmful to the country. We saw on February 6 how tens of thousands of people can die within a minute. For the common good, these two actors have to work together.”
Critics of the central government plan also say that the proposal simply builds upon the same approach to development that helped create the dangerous dilemma Istanbul now finds itself in.
“Urban improvement and transformation projects in Istanbul have so far largely taken place in a profit-oriented manner, with sites selected because the value of land and housing there is very high,” said Güney, the social scientist. “Demolishing and reconstructing buildings in these areas can double the prices of apartments in a year or two – an enormous profit in a short time. But other neighborhoods with high earthquake risk and old housing stock are completely neglected because reconstruction there would not be profitable enough.”
The Istanbul municipality estimates that up to 750,000 housing units, including many recently constructed ones, may be sitting vacant in the city because they were built as higher-end investment properties. “Because the government’s economic strategy has been completely based on the construction sector, there is a discrepancy between the existing buildings and what people need for living in,” said Keyman at the Istanbul Policy Center.
Rampant construction has also had other negative effects on disaster preparedness. In the wake of an earthquake, “you need evacuation corridors so people can get in and out, you need open spaces for gathering and setting up temporary shelters,” said Göktuğ Yeni, an urban planner and assistant secretary of the board of the Chamber of City Planners.
But of the 496 open spaces around the city designated after the 1999 disaster as earthquake gathering areas, only 77 remain. The rest have been built over, according to a 2017 report by the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects. The organization has been a frequent critic of the central government’s urban development plans: two prominent members, city planner Tayfun Kahraman and architect Ayşe Mücella Yapıcı, are both serving long jail sentences after what was widely seen as a politically motivated prosecution.
Involving NGOs is essential in creating comprehensive response strategies for earthquakes and other urban challenges, said Yeni. He believes the satellite cities plan will primarily serve to make more land in outlying forest and agricultural areas available to developers, damaging the environment and reducing the supply of locally grown food available in the event of a disaster.
“We need to be thinking about resilience — economically, socially, and environmentally — not just readiness,” Yeni said. “And we need to prepare for before, during, and after an earthquake. Right now, we are only at the first of these steps.”
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