Caring for debt: women’s work in Istanbul’s mass housing estates

ABSTRACT

The housing programs of Turkey’s Mass Housing Administration (TOKI) for low-income groups put people into debt by selling them houses in remote housing estates and dragging them into a quasi-mortgage system operated by state banks. This paper argues that these (mortgage) debts are not just financial obligations, managed in terms of income and payments but are embodied processes that are cared for within and across households, increasing precarity and intensifying the burdens of social reproduction for women. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul in 2019 to examine the lived experiences of indebtedness in a low-income TOKI estate. The paper analyzes the spatial and gendered aspects of the everyday negotiations of debts and labor, theorizing caring for debt as women’s work. I draw attention to how caring for debt becomes women’s life work in the gendered debt geographies that TOKI creates at the periphery of Istanbul.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• indebtedness
• social reproduction
• care labor
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

This article is adapted from my doctoral dissertation at the University of Waterloo. Thank you to Nancy Worth, Martine August, Alison Mountz, Tara Vinodrai, Jane Pollard, and Alan Walks for their guidance and feedback. I am grateful to Linda Peake and GenUrb's editorial collective for organizing this special issue and for their constructive feedback along the way. Also, my sincere thanks to Yamini Narayanan and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped me improve earlier versions of this paper. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to families in TOKI estates who welcomed me to their homes and lives, trusting me with their experiences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).