Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [92]
Prime Minister Özal’s 1983 land-ownership law had quietly introduced a potent innovation known as the Improvement Plan. In order to integrate these districts into the city and rid them of the most unsanitary or ill-constructed houses, the law allowed neighborhoods to improve their chaotic slums in three ways. First, they could choose conservation, in which existing gecekondu houses were legalized, physically improved, and provided with public services. The second choice was redevelopment: replacement of the existing stock with apartment blocks. And the third was clearance: selling off and bulldozing the gecekondu and selling the land to developers for profit.
What Özal could not have foreseen was that almost none of the gecekondu-dwellers would choose to keep their homes. For a great many residents, it was hard to resist the possibility of turning their self-built house into a multi-story building that would be worth much more and generate a constant stream of rental income. Others were tempted to sell their homes, for a sum they’d never seen before, to a group of developers, in exchange for which they’d receive ownership of one of the condominiums and a share of the rental income of the rest (a popular Turkish arrangement). Even those who would have preferred to stay in their little house with its neat courtyard soon found themselves feeling otherwise. “I would not like to tear my gecekondu house down and build again an apartment house,” one well-established resident said at the time, “but if the neighbors do it, I also have to. Otherwise, we would not get any sunshine in the house.”19
The Improvement Plan in Mustafa Kemal changed the place overnight. In 1989, an Istanbul mayor friendly to left-wing causes granted Sabri’s constituents the right to build apartments up to five stories. Almost everyone took him up on the offer. “If you were to have visited here at the end of the ’80s,” the historian Şükrü Aslan says, “you would still see entirely gecekondu houses with gardens around them—but as soon as it was permitted, people tore them down and built larger buildings. This happened all at once, just like the gecekondus themselves. People saw that their land was worth more, so they said, ‘Let’s start using every square millimeter.’ It switched almost immediately from an idealistic mentality to a much more profit-driven one.”
Today, Mustafa Kemal looks nothing at all like a squatter settlement, unless you know where to look. In a back street, you will occasionally spot a lone example of the old self-built houses, which now sport attractive paint jobs, red-tiled roofs, smoking chimneys, and satellite dishes; they represent perhaps one building out of every 20. For the most part, the busy streets are lined with modern stuccoed and painted buildings, almost all exactly five stories tall, with shops on the bottom floor and apartment balconies (also studded with satellite dishes) above. A slash of multi-lane highway, built in the 1990s, cuts through the bottom of the valley, its noisy shoulder lined with the old gecekondu houses, some of them cut in half by the land appropriation. This time around, the residents didn’t mount a violent protest against the government. They were paid good money for their land, so they moved on without complaint, usually to more desirable gecekondus.
Sabri Koçyigit tells me this story on an outrageously hot July day, just before a national election. He is running, not for the first time, as a parliamentary candidate for the far-left Freedom and Solidarity Party; the stretch of the busy street around his office is strung with the party’s banners. After I drop in on his campaign office, decorated with images of protesters and triumphant workers, he takes me downstairs to drink tea in the shop of his friend, who sits behind a lavish hardwood desk facing a display of sophisticated double-glazed windows—a commodity whose increasing popularity