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Today, beneath his balding pate and his salt-and-pepper mustache, Sabri’s easygoing demeanor still occasionally rises to heights of principled anger, especially when we come to the treatment of Turkey’s Kurds and Alevis at the hands of the army. When we discuss the changes that have overtaken Turkey, and especially the settlements outside Istanbul, his bitterness seems a well-worn posture, one he delivers with a smile. “Look, the voters here are not revolutionaries any more, I will admit that—the money is keeping people away from their old principles, and their votes are easier to buy.”

Indeed, while the former May 1 neighborhood still votes more heavily for the far left than most neighborhoods, it no longer gives victories to Sabri or his comrades, who haven’t won an election since the 1990s. The majority of its votes in 2007 went to those old enemies, the Kemalists of the Republican People’s Party. Sabri’s party attracted 0.15 percent of the national vote and came a distant second here. It is, he says, a sign of the bourgeois culture that’s overtaken his neighborhood.

It then strikes me to ask him what has become of his hand-built gecekondu house. Does it still look the same? Has he added double-glazed windows? Could I possibly visit? With a sheepish smile, he looks to the floor and points across the busy road. There, perched on a prime corner lot, is a large five-story building whose street level sports a chicken restaurant, a delicatessen, two cell-phone shops, a clothing store, and a travel agent, with a couple of dozen large rental apartments upstairs, a formidable rent-generating enterprise. “That,” he says quietly, “is what I have done with my house.”

I tease him: “So it seems that the outcome of your years of Marxist struggle has been your own transformation into a petit-bourgeois member of the dreaded rentier class.” He frowns, then looks up and laughs brightly, raising his finger to the sky: “Absolutely not! No matter what has happened, I will not accept the name petit bourgeois! That name cannot possibly apply to me. I have always been a communist.”

Like so many of his squatter neighbors, though perhaps more entertainingly so, Sabri is still coming to terms with the strange twist of fate that has turned them from the midnight diggers on the outskirts into the menace on the outskirts and then, finally, into members of Turkey’s dominant economic and political class.

THE NEW ARRIVALS CONFRONT THE ARRIVAL CITY

To see what has happened to the Turkish arrival city in the years since its success, you should leave Sabri Koçyigit’s office and walk several blocks uphill, to a slightly more chaotic street, and take a seat in a café called Hope. Behind its faux-rustic façade, the hand-hewn wood benches are covered in carpets, and the walls display deliberately corny pastoral scenes. This is what Turks call a “folklore bar,” an increasingly popular institution in the arrival cities of Istanbul and Ankara, a hangout for the generation who arrived here in the 1990s and after.

The handsome, stocky man with the neatly trimmed beard who brings you your tea is named Kemal Doğan. This place is his—that is, he rents it, as he does his apartment. If Sabri’s generation became lavish homeowners, Kemal’s generation are, for a number of reasons, perpetual tenants. He called the place Hope (Umut) shortly after he took it over in 2000, after his newborn son. His interests, like those of most of his generation, were in working hard to make enough money to support his family, not in building any kind of ideological utopia. He, too, got off the bus at Harem. It was 1993, he was 23, and life had become unbearable in his family’s home of Erzincan, in Turkey’s far east. There had been a serious earthquake, the military-ethnic conflicts were endless, and his family didn’t have the money to go into farming in a serious way. He knew that there were plenty of Erzincan residents, including several of his uncles, living in a certain neighborhood in Istanbul, so he rode