Housing policies in Turkey post 2002

Abstract

Turkey, under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), has launched large-scale national housing programmes in line with the emerging international trend in low-income housing provision. This paper analyses the place of the government’s housing programmes in economic policy and in the international context to illustrate the overall picture of the Turkish housing policy in the AKP era. Housing programmes have enabled low and middle-income people to access homeownership. However, other areas of housing policy such as land provision, taxes, subsidies, or housing finance have ignored the housing needs of low-income households. The case of Turkey reveals that the area on which the government should focus for low-income housing provision is access to affordable finance.

Keywords:

• Turkey
• housing provision
• social housing policy
• low-income housing
• housing finance

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı (TOKİ)

2 In the Turkish context, the term ‘social housing’ refers to housing built by the HDA and sold to households at subsidised prices.

3 Aile ve Sosyal Hizmetler Bakanlığı

4 Sosyal Konut Projesi

5 Due to dissatisfaction with the quality and late delivery of HDA housing, the total number of complaints filed against HDA in the court reached 39,434 in June 2014 (Turkish Court of Accounts, 2014, p. 7). Furthermore, due to the large number of complaints, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey has appointed a sub-committee to investigate the complaints.