Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from the previous Parts 1, 2, and 3.]

Partway through my presentation at the Turkish Real Estate Summit in Istanbul, and just after I’d shown the pictures of imploding US and UK high-rises, I touched briefly on the rhinoceros in the room, the unvoiced risk: earthquake.

Izmit 1999: Which of these three buildings lacked structural reinforcement?

Istanbul is right in the strike zone of an impending earthquake. As reported last December in The Guardian:

In a highly effective ad, the word Istanbul appears in capital letters made of stone across the screen. As a magnitude counter below clocks up the decimal points, the word cracks and crumbles into dust. A voice warns: “Like it or lump it, there is going to be a big destructive earthquake in Istanbul.”

It’s powerful sales technique to induce anxiety that can be relieved only by acquiring one’s product:

The ad is selling steel-girded flats and houses ostensibly guaranteed to cope with anything the North Anatolian fault can throw at them. In the past month [December, 2006 — Ed.], the company has sold more than 60 flats and cannot keep up with demand.

Just alike a bowling alley, with the heavy weight rolling east to west … toward Istanbul

“Maybe the advert’s a bit scary. But we’re dealing in facts,” said Cuneyt Kilic, deputy director of the building firm. “We’re just reminding people. You can’t ignore this. All the experts say that a seriously big earthquake in Istanbul will definitely happen.”

It is not a question of if but when. Every year under the sea, the southern slab of the fault pushes up from the Arabian peninsula, shifting the northern plate 2.5cm (one inch) towards Greece, a very fast rate of rupture.

“It’s inevitable, a certainty,” said Professor Okan Tuysuz, director of the Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences at the city’s Technical University. “We know the scale. We know the place. We just don’t know exactly when, but there’s a 65% probability that Istanbul will be hit by a 7.6 earthquake by 2030. That’s a very high probability.”

To put that in context, 7.6 is greater than the Northridge earthquake, which hit a rich state that has a half-century focus on earthquake-reinforcement of its structures, and nevertheless did this:

Northridge, 1994: a 7.4 earthquake

This prediction is supported by a torrent of research in recent years that has highlighted the vulnerability of this city, which is one of Europe’s biggest, and the challenges of being ready for such a natural disaster. With a population of up to 15 million, growing at an estimated 400,000 a year, and with 1.6m buildings, the effect of the gloom-mongering is to engender mass anxiety about life choices: where to live, how to afford it, how to get organised.

“I’m living in a safe area, very strong, earthquake-proof,” said a successful middle-class professional in his 30s. “But I’m paying a very high rent. It’s a simple equation here. The rents are high where the earth is strong.”

Because urban land’s value is a residual derived from post-development values, poor people live in low land-value areas, and that in turn often means they live in the least-desirable places. Mobile-home parks, for example, are often on the poorest land: commonly situated next to industrial areas, by the railroad tracks, or in low-lying and possibly swampy or flood-prone areas. During Katrina, the rich were safe because they were on the higher, first-settled ground; the New Orleans neighborhoods destroyed by Katrina were below-sea-level because those were the latest settled, least valuable, and least defended. The same patterns hold true in Istanbul:

Prof Tuysuz said: “The European side of Istanbul is built on soft rock, the north and the Asian side sits on hard old rock. That’s why the rich have their villas in the Bosphorus area [in the north].”

The poor’s exposure to natural disasters extends from the situational into the financial. Because poor people lack money, they tend not to buy flood insurance, or earthquake reinforcement, or any of that long-term structural protection — not because they don’t want it, but because poverty makes them fatalists. As we’ve seen, insurance often controls rebuilding; what is not insured is not rebuilt.

Turkey generally, and Istanbul in particular, have a lot of vulnerable housing. Turkey has a population of 72 million, with greater Istanbul capturing roughly a quarter of that, possibly 15 million. Like Cairo, its demographic if not ethnic comparable,

Typical middle-upper income high-rise in Cairo

the vast majority of this housing is made of adobe, brick, or cement.

Aswan residential mid-rise; rebar not obvious, if present at all

As in Cairo and Johannesburg, much of this is informal or unregistered, known as gecekondu:

… because they are “built at night.” This squatter housing takes advantage of an ancient law that says if construction begins after sundown, whatever is standing at sunrise has legal status. According to Robert Neuwirth, half the residents of Istanbul — perhaps six million people — live in gecekondus.

Gecekondo housing in Ankara, rising up the hillsides

Such housing is pervasive throughout Turkey. As the BBC reported in 1999:

Professor Nezhdet Teymur, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, says the lack of a public housing programme and the country’s poor inspection system are at the root of the sub-standard, modern housing that has been built on the edges of many cities.

He told the BBC that, while older buildings made of solid materials had remained intact, much of the modern housing in poorer urban areas was constructed from mud brick and was unable to withstand the impact of such a tremor.

Whole neighborhoods are gecekondu

How well do you think this will hold up in an earthquake?

In an earthquake, housing lacking rebar or earthquake reinforcement tends to come straight down, crushing everything underneath:

Not only property damage, lives lost

The BBC’s 1999 story again:

The problem was compounded, he said, by the huge influx of people from rural areas into Istanbul and Izmit in search of cheap housing.

“Up to 1,000 migrants pour into Istanbul every day. Even the richest country in the world would not be able to accommodate them,” said Professor Teymur.

We see this pattern throughout the world, particularly the developing or fusion countries. Their economies generate wealth and jobs that create a blindingly bright economic light, attracting millions of new residents. The result is sprawling spontaneous communities:

Turkey’s Chamber of Commerce estimates that some 65% of all buildings are constructed without a permit or with scant attention to building regulations.

More than half the population in Istanbul is living in illegal accommodation, it says.

In the 1999 Izmit quake, more than 17,000 people died — most of them low income.

[BBC, 1999]: Questions are being asked why houses crumpled like packs of cards

The BBC Web site again:

Newspapers and commentators pointed the finger at unscrupulous land and building contractors, who they said should be held responsible for the poor quality of housing, much of which is illegal.

Even before an inquiry into the disaster had been announced, the best-selling Hurriyet newspaper was unequivocal in apportioning blame, running the headline “Murderers!”

Cheaply-built, illegal housing lies at the heart of this disaster, said engineering experts.

It accounts for why so many houses just crumpled like packs of cards and why older or more solid buildings remained intact.

A similar fault line — economic class distinctions made manifest by a natural disaster — has raised clear fault lines in post-Katrina New New Orleans.

Thus, I said to my audience, it is all terrific to build new housing at the top of the bankability pyramid, but it cannot possibly be enough, or cheap enough, to eliminate demand for gecekondu housing. As reported in a 2005 Foreign Direct Investment article:

Not only that but nearly 55% of all homes in Turkey are slum dwellings, not recorded by authorities and thus untaxed. Vast neighbourhoods of slum houses, known as ‘gece kondu’ (‘night landings’ – literally built overnight on private property or state lands by an influx of Anatolian peasantry), encircle the cities, mar the urban landscape and make up to 70% of the dwellings in the metropolitan areas of western Turkey. These shoddily built housing units are unsafe in earthquake-prone Turkey, Mr Sur says.

Political pressure, like seismic pressure, is building, as gecekondu residents seek formalization of their ownership and building status.

I believe the new mortgage law will simply widen that divide, exacerbate demand for formalization, and create a powerful political-economic pressure. Informal housing will not be able to tap the mortgage system, which means that it will not benefit from the wealth multiplier about to be bestowed on those who can tap formal financing.

Formalized values go up, informalized values stay down, result major affordability gap!

Therefore, I urged (however briefly), the government should develop an incremental housing program whereby those who want to formalize title/ permitting and earthquake-reinforce their homes can do so, with the assistance of a government-insured or government-subsidized earthquake improvement loan to be administered through the banks and financial institutions.

When homesteading becomes rampant and the homesteaders become citizens, government usually finds it does better, economically and politically, no longer to ignore the problem but to offer an amnesty that some people may choose to earn, whereby their status and property are formalized, licensed, entitled, and taxed.

Which leads to the parts of my talk that, lacking time, I only sketched –

Some people are better sketchers than others

What can Turkey do to improve its affordable housing?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 5.]

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