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The millions of people who arrived in Istanbul’s outskirts in the 1990s had quite a different experience from those of the previous four decades. They, too, came from villages whose agriculture had stopped needing labor and were seeking better jobs in the city. But they were arriving in a different world. The spectacular balance of economic growth and social improvement that had marked the 1980s had come crashing to a halt in the ’90s as unsustainable levels of government debt led to a rapid currency devaluation, throwing the economy into turmoil. And the old economy of secure, long-term industrial jobs in state-supported enterprises had disappeared, replaced with a diverse trade-driven economy, which offered more opportunities but less job security.

The arrivals were a different group, too. If the previous generation was drawn by promises of employment, this enormous group was largely pushed out by rural deprivation, especially in the war-torn east, where the Turkish military was shutting down hundreds of villages and expelling their residents. These victims were forced to move as entire families, and they had little opportunity to adjust to the contours and rhythms of urban life. “Poverty among newcomers was so high that they could not even afford to build a gecekondu house,” one observer wrote. “There was a lack of unoccupied land. People could only find accommodation in old and consolidated gecekondu areas as tenants.” By the end of the 1990s, the proportion of tenants in the former gecekondu neighborhoods had reached 80 percent.20

Kemal followed the hopscotch pattern of the second-generation migrant: First he got a job in a furniture shop, and he rented an old gecekondu house. It belonged to his uncle, who had been one of the revolutionaries who built this place in the ’70s. Actually, it was only half a house: his uncle had built at the bottom of the valley, and when the highway came along, he’d happily taken the money to have his house bisected. Kemal spent some money renovating the place, making it habitable, installing a satellite dish. He brought his mother and his little sister over to live with him. The noisy half-house became impossible, so he rented a flat on the third floor of one of those innumerable five-story buildings.

He worked in the furniture store for two years, then in an insurance company’s branch office. Then he took a job managing a school cafeteria. His wife worked as a secretary, then as an accountant. No matter how traditional their background, Turks of Kemal’s generation have learned that husband and wife both must work. Across the road from the high school was an abandoned café, so he rented it, bought the contents of a village’s old bar from a friend, and, when his son was born, he painted a sign reading “Hope.” The two jobs complement each other nicely but don’t earn him enough money to buy a place.

Home ownership is an unobtainable goal for many members of this generation. The signs in the real-estate agent’s shop attest to the astonishing rise in the price of self-built homes: “Gecekondu, 3 rooms, 60,000 new lira, 170 square meters … Gecekondu, with deed, 85,000 new lira.” In other words, those rudimentary abodes, built with stones, hard labor, and hope, are selling for $40,000 to $55,000 each, and in adjoining districts they cost considerably more. A well-paid factory worker might earn $18,000 a year. Something has changed, and it isn’t just the land prices.

Kemal and a good number of his customers seem to have done well in the optimistic years of the early twenty-first century, making the slow march into the lower ranks of the middle class in Turkey’s fast-reviving economy. And they weren’t hurt by the recession that began in 2008, whose effects on credit and employment largely bypassed Turkey. These are upwardly mobile arrivals. Nevertheless, they have little sympathy for the idealists who built this place—in fact, most of what they express is scorn.

And no wonder: what is visibly, painfully missing here is the assistance of the state,