At first I thought the headline was click-bait, but it's actually accurate.
The videos really, truly show Erdogan repeatedly boasting about giving "amnesty" to private builders to ignore regulatory codes in order to "solve" Turkey's housing shortage. It appears that a majority of the thousands of buildings that crumbled into dust when the earthquake struck were constructed under such "amnesty."
In hindsight, Erdogan looks like a naive moron, and the private builders who put innocent lives at risk to maximize short-term profit look like movie villains.
He also blamed all the developers and immediately arrested them:
Vice President Fuat Oktay said overnight that 131 suspects had so far been identified as responsible for the collapse of some of the thousands of buildings flattened in the 10 provinces affected by the tremors early last Monday.
It seems pretty ridiculous for a government official to say "I am giving you permission to bypass these rules" and then arrest them for breaking those rules.
Sure, requesting an exemption may be an act of greed, but the role of responsible government is to say "No, those rules are there for a reason".
If developers legally bypassed regulations due to the government saying it's okay, the buck should absolutely stop with the government, and the question should be why they allowed those exemptions.
> It seems pretty ridiculous for a government official to say "I am giving you permission to bypass these rules" and then arrest them for breaking those rules.
You seem surprised that an autocratic government would act illogically or immorally, and play according to rules that benefit them. They're just covering their asses so it can look like they're acting on behalf of the people. As soon as this blows over, it will be business as usual.
The only thing they need to worry about is to not screw over someone powerful, which might backfire, but otherwise this is not unexpected.
I don't disagree with you but I think there is a sort of difference that makes the comparison to software developers[1] a bit false. The cost for software developers[1] to fix things after the fact is generally lower than the cost of developing it again from scratch - the cost for contractors to fix an existing fully constructed building that didn't have rebar put in is... tear it all down (expensive), dispose of all that waste (expensive), probably double check the site to make sure things in the ground didn't shift during the construction and destruction (expensive) and rebuild the building from scratch.
Personally I'm against amnesty for contractors - if a building was poorly constructed the people responsible for that decision should be treated harshly... but I think there is a reasonable discussion to have around amnesty for the buildings themselves.
1. (Was originally just "developers" edited to "software developers" for clarity)
Yeah, based on my understanding, I think I agree with you across the board.
Saying "this building already exists, so we'll let it slide" and doing retrofits as able seems like a reasonable compromise.
If you allow new construction to bypass safety regulations though, it's unreasonable to then punish contractors for bypassing safety regulations. Regulators should never have granted exemptions for such projects, and it should be their feet to the fire on this one.
Which is basically how building codes work in the US. You gotta meet the ones in force at time of building, but modifications have to be built up to code.
> The cost for developers to fix things after the fact is generally lower than the cost of developing it again from scratch
I don't follow - could you expand on why this would be the case? What's the distinction here between the developer and the contractor when it comes to costs?
Sorry, the terminology is kind of terrible here - by developer I meant software developer. That's pretty egregiously confusing so I've edited the comment. I'm actually uncertain now if the parent I was replying to was talking about software or real estate developers so my response might be a bit of a miss.
These folks definitely deserve a pretty big penalty levied on them - but if the policy of giving out these sorts of amnesties isn't reformed we can expect a repeat. I'm concerned that the government is going to force all of the blame onto these contractors for political reasons and won't end up enacting any reforms of inspectors since it'd make Erdogan look bad.
It's so like people who do wrong. He's accusing the developers of flouting construction code and jailing them when he encouraged them to take the shortcuts all along!
The scapegoating was so predictable that quite a few apartment block owners, contractors, architects and other people involved in the building industry fled abroad. And a whole bunch of them that moved just a little bit slower were nabbed at the airport whilst waiting for their flights.
The tragedy is that this horrible practice of building for failure did not meet with public outcry when publicly admitted years ago but had to await actual failure...
Politicians decided that houses could now safely be built in flood zones because "we had no major flood for the last 20-40 years". (and it could safely be assumed that at least some of them benefited privately from those decisions, it’s a common practice here)
Guess what happened in 2021 ? yep… The most deadly flood in human memory.
Guess what happened to those politicians ? Yep, absolutely nothing.
A Turkish friend told me at the time those buildings were being built that Erdogan was buying votes and loyalty from those buildings inhabitants. So he is absolutely not innocent
Are we sure? I would normally interpret "zoning amnesty" to mean "you wouldn't normally be allowed to build that thing there, but we'll allow it", and letting people avoid earthquake codes would be more like "building code amnesty". Did these certificates actually exempt projects from the building code?
I would caution against trying to parse the language. This is Turkey, they don't even use the words zoning and building code there (it's English with associated context), they use the Turkish equivalent. Their legal system is also completely different (continental vs common law). Just high level take away is Erdogan is boasting about helping builders avoid earthquake related building laws.
The phrase "zoning amnesty"/"zoning peace" is like the "death tax" or the "green new deal" - a way of rebranding a controversial political issue to make it seem incontroversial and obvious. It's called this precisely so that uninformed citizens will make the same mistake and think "Yes, why should people be homeless over some trivial political bullshit like zoning laws?"
From everything I've been able to find, it was building code amnesty, in effect. The proliferation of these laws in Turkey, dating back all the way to the 1940s, created a culture where builders could basically build what they want, without the necessary permits/code enforcement, confident in the knowledge that they would fall under the next decree of amnesty and never be required to fix it.
"...more than 50 percent of the buildings in Turkey were constructed in violation of the current building code... Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (TMMOB) Ankara branch chair Selim Tulumtaş warned .. that the legislation put the lives of 2.7 million people across the country at risk since they live in shoddily constructed buildings."
https://www.turkishminute.com/2023/02/13/turkey-construction...
It certainly sounds stupid, but in the spirit of completeness this is forming a conclusion with insufficient evidence and part of a typical emotional response that makes people do stupid things.
We don't live forever, and sustained mass homelessness is arguably pretty bad too. If Turkey can't afford indestructible houses then maybe Erdogan made the right decision and it just happens that all the outcomes sucked. Although given the evidence in the article it does look like a catastrophe (20k dead for 350k housed sounds is a bad deal, albeit we can't possibly know that all 20k were from zoning issues) the news right after a disaster is usually highly misleading.
What are you talking about? This isnt the first earthquake in the region, it s a story that goes back thousands of years of written history. Most countries in the area have changed their codes and now build houses that are very resistant to earthquakes. Earthquakes happen all the time, (arguably not as big) but rarely you hear about such damages. Turkey has a problem of bad building, like what happened with the Izmir earthquake in 2020
Which presumably is no secret and which would have been considered in the decision making - indeed, everyone involved would have known that the next earthquake would have worse consequences.
The issue I have - and it is in your comment as well as elsewhere - is you are using an argument that this situation was predictable. That isn't enough. You have to argue that the costs in this disaster outweighed the benefits of a lighter building code. My guess would be that they probably do, the death count is quite high. But that is no excuse for sloppy, knee-jerk thinking. We need less of that.
It's not knee jerk thinking. Even turkey has nominally strict building codes because of all the previous earthquakes. And it s not like it s running out of land to build. Nobody in this region thinks it could possibly be a good thing to skirt building codes. Earthquakes are frequent enough to be constant reminders of it
Erdogan has previously appeared in videos where he proudly boasted about how he allowed people to skirt building codes. I think there are a lot of people who think it could possibly be a good thing. Otherwise he wouldn't have been giving speeches about it.
He's possibly misjudged the cost-benefits; it'd hardly be the first time people have made big mistakes. But we should at least have solid evidence of that before jumping to conclusions.
I'm sure all the people now left homeless after their homes collapsed will be very understanding of how these amnesties helped solve homelessness. Oh, and it's looking more like 33k killed by the latest count, and over 90k injured.
Your point that sometimes it's better to shoot for a mediocre solution to remedy a problem is valid; perfect being the enemy of the good and all.
In this case, though, it seems incredibly evident in hindsight that the trade-off here was not, in fact, the right call.
The thing about bypassing safety valves is that you need to be really sure that you're not just creating a bomb that's going to blow up down the line.
In the case of earthquake regulations that were passed in response to a history of earthquakes, it's pretty hard to reasonably assume that the trade-off would be worth it in the long term, hence the outrage.
But if you act based on what seems incredibly evident in the month following a disaster, it is common to take action on facts that later turn out to be wrong. There is a reason that courts and engineering reports take a long time - figuring out what actually happened vs. what seems to have just happened is a big step up in difficulty.
Turkey was doing just fine until Erdogan rolled along, they were really moving in the right direction, becoming a much stronger player economically on the world stage and quality of life was improving. Since then it's been one long series of setbacks, the guy has been a complete disaster for Turkey and a benefit to a very small subset of Turkey.
We're not talking about a zero-sum game where there's X dollars for housing and either you house some people safely or house everyone. Turkey has been expanding it's military spending significantly since Erdogan came to power - it's not unrealistic to imagine some of that revenue could have been redirected to subsidized housing projects and the like.
Turkey is very close to Russia and is in NATO. The two largest nuclear powers are fighting a war that shares a sea border with them. It may well turn out to be suicidal not to beef up their military. It is unrealistic to redirect some of that revenue to general projects.
Perfect example of "privatized gains, socialized losses".
In a just world every decision maker with blood on their hands would pay with their wealth for tens of thousands of lives extinguished, which means: back to working class, should they ever leave prison.
But surely they'll have it all squirreled away off-shore and nothing of substance will change.
> "We solved the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maras with zoning amnesty," Erdogan said, using his term for the construction amnesties handed out to allow contractors to ignore the safety codes that had been put on the books specifically to make apartment blocks, houses and office buildings more resistant to earthquakes.
At my previous job I warned the CEO that we were risking the product's stability with the latest features. I told him we would be in trouble with our users within weeks.
I switched jobs shortly after that, and a few weeks later I learnt the company had lost ~35% MRR overnight. Their biggest customer had fired them due to the app's poor service level.
Stupid leaders are everywhere and they can have absolute power at some organizations, including governments. They are well advised, they just don't give a fuck.
Sadly this has been a norm in countries/places with a mix of corruption and ineffective enforcement of laws.
Back in my home town in India, tons of my relatives have built huge multi-storey buildings all the while ignoring the city code about spacing between adjacent buildings or distance of structure from main road.
That's not to say that everyone ends up kicking the rules, but the number of people who have done that in past 20+years makes me wonder how is it that easy to not follow municipal building code.
Hope, that it doesn't take a natural calamity for people to realize the importance of code and the local civil enforcement starts using its power!
This wonton disregard for the rules in India comes up every so often, it gets plenty of airtime on the 24 hours news channels when an avoidable tragedy occurs, and nothing changes. For example, a few years ago there was a fire in a makeshift factory in Delhi, operating illegally inside a tenement building. The surrounding buildings had built unauthorized wings, blocking access for fire trucks & dozens of people died. Nothing changed.
- "Turkey’s vice-president, Fuat Oktay, said on Sunday that authorities had identified 131 people suspected of being responsible for the collapse of some of the thousands of buildings flattened, and that detention orders had been issued for 113 of them."
"“We will follow this up meticulously until the necessary judicial process is concluded, especially for buildings that suffered heavy damage and caused deaths and injuries,” Oktay said. Special investigation units have been set up in the 10 provinces affected."
Text book blame game now after realizing the cost.
Often, the builders and contractors have dealings with politicians to get favors and perks.
I am not accusing or calling that there is corruption between politicians and builders. But one of the criterion that Turkey is measuring for its inclusion in EU is corruption. It would be interesting to see impact of this on corruption scores in EU progress report. It has already been noted that there is no progress in fight against corruption [^a]
this is reason why so many people are against admitting turkey to the eu. it's not racism, or fear of immigration, its hatred of corruption and fascism in the turkish state.
having spent a huge chunk of my life in a greek/turkish neighbourhood in north london i like turks, shop in turkish shops, eat turkish food, etc. but they really need to kick out this horrible bastard.
What will probably happen next/Free playbook for Recep: claim the videos are deepfaked and fake news, and ban their publication, and jail anyone who claims he ever said those things. The goal is to minimize the spread of this information before the election.
My understanding is that a significant amount of Edrogan's support actually comes from foreign-resident voters - either expat Turks or people with dual citizenship. There are e.g. British and Germans with Turkish citizenship who don't have to deal with the fallout of voting for him, but love his rhetoric and persona.
This prompted a huge flurry of investigations and inspections. (See "Building Integrity" on YouTube for a particularly good series)
Turkey has suffered thousands of Champlain collapses. I can't imagine that there will be enough resources to investigate each collapse at even 1% of the intensity that has been devoted to Champlain Towers.
There were quite a lot of videos from survivors of collapsed buildings now with testimony about blatant violations. For example stores opening in bottom floors who simply remove columned and load bearing walls to open up the store space.
When the violations aren’t merely corner cutting or negligence during construction but that clear, then testimony, photos (from said store) should be pretty easy to find. The investigation obviously still needs to find who was responsible, but at least it’s just a legal investigation and not a technical one.
And even if they did have those resources quite a few of the possible outcomes of such investigations would be considered unprintable if you wanted to stay in your job (or even in Turkey).
This is the same kind of mentality espoused by "cut the red tape" types in the West. The kind who post images such as the 1930s construction workers having lunch on a suspended beam with a caption like "Back when we could build things". Worker fatality rates, of course, not even alluded to.
If you try to eliminate bureaucracy, you very quickly find out what it was all for.
Turkish developers building unsafe buildings that kill people, doesn't mean that preschools should lose their license if they have full fat milk instead of 2% milk (actual regulation where I live). Not all red tape is created equal
I'm waiting to find out what all the red tape really is for. Some of it, like earthquake resilience, I understand. But licensing of barbers in some states while not in others, I'll have to wait for the inevitable disaster that will befall unlicensed barbers to teach me my lesson.
For you it probably is easy because you very quickly find out what those licenses are for.
Ayn Rand lives rent free in your mind.
Your post is needlessly political, but you have a fair point. Ultimately there is a balance between too much and not enough regulation.
Certain regulations are very important, such as those for public safety around earthquakes, floods, fires, etc.
But we have a lot of zoning regulation in this country that seemingly just exists to support special interests at the detriment of society as a whole.
For instance, there is a significant amount of single family zoning in California that has prevented developers from building sufficient housing density where it is needed. Recently, some areas have lost their zoning privileges due to state law because they’ve refused to take any steps to solve the problem.
I believe we need to significantly reduce zoning restrictions around the country to allow for more housing to be built with the aim of bringing down housing costs.
I agree with you and just would like to note that me mentioning Ayn Rand came about because the original comment that I was replying to initially had her mentioned. The author must have edited it to remove her.
Unfortunately even the most modern nations have politicians pushing to "cut red tape"
Im truly shocked the private sector in Turkey didn't solve this problem themselves, and needed government oversight to make sure they're doing their job correctly
The red tape people are asking to be cut isn't basic safety regulations, generally speaking.
Japan is the reference Turkey was supposed to follow for dealing with earthquakes, and Japan is known for both building being fairly easy ("as of right"), and also for being relatively strict for earthquake resistance. You can have both.
Japan may be one of the very few countries where real estate is not an investment, precisely because of their strict, and ever evolving, safety standards, essentially prioritizing people over economic gains.
I don't see how Turkey would commit to such an economic turnaround.
Japan has excellent freight infrastructure, which in turn sustains the construction industry, because buildings are made of stuff. Turkey, well... Mexico is beating them.
Can you elaborate on the specific pieces and strands of red tape that are asking to be cut that don't impact safety?
I'm certainly not an expert on the depths, lengths, and colors of said tape - but typically that tape is put in place after public outcry from past negligence or perhaps by entrenched players looking to protect their dominant market position by increasing costs to new entrants.
If it's the latter I'd imagine there's easily-cited examples of obvious marketing protection that has nothing to do with safety.
> Can you elaborate on the specific pieces and strands of red tape that are asking to be cut that don't impact safety?
Sure, basically everything the US has that Japan doesn't have.
Now, building regulations are often local in the US, so you can't generalize perfectly across the whole country. But for example, it's common to have planning boards that can block new construction for any reason, and community meetings where residents can raise any objection. The result of this can be residents complaining at meetings before development that a building is "too tall" (even though zoning allows that height), casts shadows, would impact parking or traffic, etc. and then the planning board will deny construction or force the developer to change plans based on those things. This is notoriously common in my native bay area, for example.
In contrast, Japan has building regulations work like how laws are supposed to work: what's actually written in the code is the law, not what exists in the minds of nearby residents and planning officials.
The "entrenched players" are usually just other homeowners and the protections come in the form of zoning and incentives to not rebuild and/or relocate (prop 13).
In the United States, a room must have a closet to be considered a bedroom. If you want to build cheap housing, one way to lower cost is to not to have a closet, something that matters in high density housing. But then you can't market your apartments as having N number of bedrooms. That's a non-safety regulation that's quite arbitrary since prior to about 100 years ago closets were very rare, but many of the houses from then still stand. Mine's master bedroom doesn't count as a bedroom, dropping the value of my house considerably.
> In the United States, a room must have a closet to be considered a bedroom.
Source? I can't find any that confirm that using actual codes (at least on a national scale), and many (from sellers and lenders, no less) that rebut it [0][1], nor do I see it in the FHA housing policy handbook [2, PDF]. It's possible that real estate businesses customarily don't let you market bedrooms without closets, but that's not regulation.
I may be wrong about the regulation of this, but in effect that's the case. Maybe it's what realtors consider bedrooms, but that's how our house was listed when we bought it and three different unrelated realtors told us the same.
If my example doesn't count, how about from the first link you provided: "A bedroom must be accessible from at least one common point in the house such as a hallway or living room. In most cases, a room cannot be considered a bedroom if it is only accessible through another bedroom in the home." This doesn't seem like a safety regulation, but a matter of what is considered appropriate these days - people shouldn't be walking through a bedroom on the way somewhere else.
When it's private organizations agreeing to rules about what they will or will not advertise as a bedroom for the purposes of commercial communication, that's called "capitalism" not regulation.
To your other point, not all regulations have to be about safety to be valid. Preventing what is effectively false advertising ("bedroom" has a presumption of privacy for the inhabitant that is belied by having to traverse another person's private space) seems like a valid use of regulation. You can still sell the house, and a buyer can still observe that the room is usable as a bedroom, but you can't advertise the house as having a bedroom that a reasonable person wouldn't consider such.
I think that's a healthy thing. Regulation has advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes it goes too far and sometimes it doesn't go far enough. So it makes sense to have people advocating both more and less of it.
This is a really sensible comment, and furthermore, what solutions work in South Dakota won't make sense in New York. Having a robust, flexible system of regulation that is debated without becoming an identity is healthy.
A good example of this is Nuclear and the East-Palestine / Ohio derailments from a few days ago. Nuclear is prohibitively expensive due to regulations, while more dangerous situations such as trains carrying hazardous chemicals had regulations cut [1] not too long ago.
Article is wrong when it is saying "emerged videos fueled outrage". It didn't. It won't.
Here is what is going to happen. The upcoming elections in May is going to be postponed, at least a year or however long it is necessary to make people forget what happened. If I know his voters, they'll forget it in couple of months.
Until just after the next manufactured crisis that makes Erdogan look good and strong.
It is such a pity because until this new phase Turkey was doing fantastic, enough to have Turkish nationals abroad and even second generation immigrants to Western countries beginning to migrate back to Turkey because they felt that it was their future once again.
Since then large numbers of people have moved out once more because of the downward spiral the country has entered and this earthquake will only accelerate the drop, it is unlikely that Erdogan will end up removed because of it. And the people that moved out were exactly the people that Turkey needs the most.
Almost 24 years ago, a massive earthquake struck Turkey (the so-called Izmit Earthquake). Tens of thousands of people died. In the wake of that disaster, an earthquake tax [1] was instituted. Billions of dollars were raised. Where did that money go? How was it spent? Well... nobody really knows [2]. The smart money is it disappeared in corruption. Contracts awarded and paid but never built, kickbacks to key political leaders, that sort of thing.
Interestingly, this same type of corruption has crippled Russia's military [2]. Contracts awarded for the next generation of tanks. Those are never built. The money is returned to generals who steal it and then a contract is awarded for a replacement. The existing contract may be cancelled when the new one is developed and those funds just disappear too.
Unfortunately you see this pattern play out a lot: a democratically elected leader corrupts the system they were elected in to ultimately become an autocrat. The scary part is a good chunk of the population in any of these countries cheer this on since they've been successfully manipulated and propagandized into this would-be dictator being the only solution to some imagined cultural moral failure.
In Nazi Germany there was cultural bolshevism [3]. Interestingly, this particular one is resurgent today rebranded as cultural Marxism [4].
What we are witnessing in Turkey, Russia and even the United States (as well as many other placces) is the rise of fascism.
The videos really, truly show Erdogan repeatedly boasting about giving "amnesty" to private builders to ignore regulatory codes in order to "solve" Turkey's housing shortage. It appears that a majority of the thousands of buildings that crumbled into dust when the earthquake struck were constructed under such "amnesty."
In hindsight, Erdogan looks like a naive moron, and the private builders who put innocent lives at risk to maximize short-term profit look like movie villains.