Should we beg the Turks for advice on how to build affordable housing?

The U.S. features a growing population and a fixed supply of housing and thus has become a textbook Econ 101 example of how rising demand lifts prices. Who has figured out how to increase housing supply dramatically? “Turkey’s Plan to Draw Refugees Back to Syria: Homes for 1 Million” (New York Times, May 4):

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Turkey will build homes, schools, hospitals and more in northern Syria, but experts question whether refugees will return willingly.

Mr. Erdogan’s announcement on Tuesday came amid a grave economic crisis that has hit the wallets of many Turks and fueled widespread anger toward the large number of people displaced from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere who now live in Turkey.

As the anger has grown, Turkish social media has lit up with furious posts about foreigners flying their flags in Turkish cities, enjoying themselves while Turks struggle to make ends meet and changing the cultural fabric of Turkish communities.

Mr. Erdogan’s announcement on Tuesday provided an update on those efforts and expanded their scope. So far, more than 57,000 out of 77,000 planned homes in Idlib Province in Syria’s northwest have been completed and now house 50,000 families, he said.

In the future, that number will grow to 100,000 homes, and a new project will be started, he said, to build enough homes for an additional 1 million Syrian refugees to move to other parts of northern Syria where Turkey holds sway.

In addition to homes, the project will provide schools, hospitals and “all the needs of daily life and self-sufficient economic infrastructure, from agriculture to industry,” Mr. Erdogan said.

All of the above happens to some extent in Florida, but the new houses are tough to characterize as “affordable.” Obviously, the Chinese have achieved dramatic results in building new cities, but the Chinese way of doing things doesn’t seem to work here (see Netflix: American Factory for example, unless you’ve desubscribed as I have!).

(Separately, we are informed that low-skill migrants make existing residents of a country wealthier. Yet the Turks are willing to spend whatever it costs to build hundreds of thousands of houses in order to rid themselves of migrants. It is a mystery!)

The backyard of a Turkish-built house that I visited in 2007:

13 thoughts on “Should we beg the Turks for advice on how to build affordable housing?

  1. building that many homes and associated civilian infrastructure sounds expensive. And Turkey is already dealing with high inflation, and potentially fuel and energy shortages if Russian oil and gas imports slows down for some reason.

    Maybe its easier for the Turks to put the Syrian refugees onto boats ( Russian oligarch yachts?) and sail them to Western Europe were they will be greated warmly by the “woke” crowd and given welfare and free housing, as in “Camp of the Saints”.

  2. I think it’s time for another look at Buckminster Fuller’s ideas, modified for the 21st Century. If you’re going to build “cheap” housing, it should be technologically excellent and designed so that the people living in it can enjoy their homes and their lives. ! Caution ! if you build a Dymaxion house you might run into trouble with the “Plumber’s Union” because you don’t need their work! I think more than anything else, that’s what put the kibosh on some of Fuller’s ideas. I would live in a 21st Century Dymaxion, no contest.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

    https://www.thehenryford.org/visit/henry-ford-museum/exhibits/dymaxion-house/

  3. I recently finished a 1,500 mile drive through a bunch of Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states. The highway system is excellent and thanks to Amazon and e-commerce it is packed every few miles with gigantic warehouses being serviced by legions of semiarticulated tractor trailers. The sheer amount of warehouse space is mind boggling.

    But beyond the warehouses, there’s PLENTY OF ROOM. And it’s nice country, too. I imagine that we could use the warehouse space to move all the components of Dymaxion-style houses and, building a few roads and so forth, this country could build millions of new, efficient and affordable housing that is not like a Cabrini Green housing project or a Postmodern Commie Architecture Zone.

    There’s a lot of pre-fab housing being built, but it’s all 20th century ugly “boxes.” We’re not doing anything forward-looking, but we have the logistics and shipping capability and the unused land to do a lot more.

  4. Of course, all the Big Thought momentum in this country is pushing hard in the direction of housing people in Microhomes on Microlots or in big sewer pipe tubes that have been repurposed to house human families. Or even worse, the “permanent home in a trailer” nomad style of life, which is anathema to civilization as we know it.

    So we need some better thinking…and soon. You want people who live in a real PLACE and who have a connection to it. A home, not a rest stop. We’ve got plenty of land, and we’ve got the shipping capability. We would only need to augment the manufacturing a little, build out some power (some of it can be solar, the rest should be nuclear) and I’ll bet we could solve this problem, build real towns and neighborhoods that people call “home” and people would live free like human beings should.

  5. Imagine the EU rebuilding for Ukraine. Would take 20 years just to get the permits.

    Btw recently Dr. Jill Biden had the cojones to go into Ukraine, unlike Sleepy Joe.
    But it makes sense.
    She’s a doctor. She can help the wounded.

    • You think the Secret Service will let the President in to an active war zone?

      Seriously deluded by Fox News here guy…

    • Anon, why secret service let first lady in the war zone? Many believe that she has more to say in governing United States then her husband.

    • Anon: Not really active currently, and I don’t believe that the U.S., UK etc., are not talking with Putin at all behind the scenes.

      The secret deal in the Cuban missile crisis (withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey) emerged much later. For all we know, there are secret negotiations and the barking on both sides is political theater. Undisturbed photo ops in Kyiv could also be part of the deal (it helped Boris Johnson with his domestic scandals).

  6. Pretty much any country in the world could give the US lessons in how to build housing, but the root causes of the inability to build are political. I find it interesting that the UK, which shares English Common Law with the US, has the same problems that other comparable European Civil Law jurisdictions like France or Germany don’t.

  7. Nice picture but my wife is from Istanbul and pretty much every one there lives in 10 or more story apartment buildings, 3 or more apartments per floor. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that is what would be built.

    As a ps to all you regulation haters you might say all these buildings have to have elevators. So great for the mobility impaired. Except you have to go up half a flight of stairs to get to the elevator.

  8. Here up in Canada, one of main problems with housing is zoning regulations and building codes. Zoning laws artificially restrict the efficient use of the land for housing even with our low population density in urban areas. The building codes and permit fees make it almost impossible to build a new 2000 sq ft house under $1 million and this is not including the cost of the land. Plus everybody is building >4000 sq ft houses, nobody is building sensible single family homes between 1500 sq ft and 2000 sq ft on smaller lots, similar to the family houses build in the 1950s and 60s. If we used building codes similar to the 1950s. the cost would probably drop by 50%. 405000 new immigrants to Canada in 2021, is the other issue, most of them settle in cities that have housing shortages, and not in rural areas that have lots of land. If the build codes and zoning issues could be solved, then a good solution for Canadian cities would probably be row housing and town houses rather than high rises. But this will never happen because it would not benefit the developers and the politicians which rule local and municipal politics with an iron fist.

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