Turkiye
There are several interesting things about Turkey, and several interesting
people and organizations.
Let's start with the people and organizations
A real estate investment company ( a Turkish REIT)
www.yapikredikoray.com
Istanbul Technical University www.itu.edu.tr
Istanbul and several other Turkish cities are represented at MIPIM
.
How do they do it?
They have more homeowners proportionately than we do while spending
a bunch less money. The magic word is Gecekondu. According to an Ottoman
law of 1858 if you can find unused government land, and build a house on
it in 24 hours, it's yours. It's a bit like the Homestead Act, with a similar
intention, but which remained on the books and has been applied to urban
development. And, basically, it has been a success. Frustrates the dickens
out of urban planners. It's a great opportunity for elected municipal politicians,
and, some say, mafias. Fantastic estate builder for the first settlers,
and that probably has provided the wealth to fuel the development of Istanbul
and Ankara for the last half century. Certainly real estate is residual
to economic activity, but, Gecekondu has distributed that residual pretty
democratically. Some see the Gecekondu neighborhoods and think of slums.
But often the same people see Anatolian villages and think them charming.
What they don't get is that the depopulated Anatolian village which they
consider picturesque has been exactly recreated in Istanbul by the community
which moved there en masse. In Istanbul they are wealthier, so there are
fewer horsecarts; more cheap cars. Also there is municipal water, sewer,
electricity, paved streets provided in order to insure the votes of the
residents. As the neighborhoods age they are redeveloped to multi-story
multiple family dwellings, usually with some sort of cooperative ownership.
More about that in a bit. A corollary, though, is the joke, 'If it's green,
it's military."
The new and the old
Istanbul is incredibly dense, but even at that, the area
of the 'old town' is a small fraction of the whole. The corollary is that
in many neighborhoods, "old" is fifty to one hundred and fifty
years old. The question of historic preservation has much the same time
dimension as it does in America. Nobody questions the preservation of the
Topkapi Palace, but what about the old Ottoman tobacco warehouse? I still
don't completely understand how buildings can stand empty until there is
nothing left of them but some walls. Alternatively, some buildings are simply
removed, possibly to create a waterfront park, or possibly a new hotel.
The Koc Museum in Istanbul is worth a visit. Not only is the collection
of technology and transportation really well done, it is housed in buildings
up to a millenium in age.
Real estate development
Clearly any city which has expanded by an order of magnitude
in half a century knows something about real estate development. Mostly
it seems to divide into two models, large and small. The large is done by
real estate investment companies which are tied to banks. The small is done
by old Gecekondu owners who "sell" their land in return for a
share in the building to be built there. The "build-for-share"
joint venture is a common form of "all equity" real estate development.
Finance
Is underdeveloped. The demand side is diminished by the prevalence of
"all equity" deals. The supply side is diminished by the reluctance
of banks to undertake the small retail loans required and to some extent
the common ownership entailed in the all equity joint ventures. So, if you
want a house loan in Turkey today, you could pay 18% or so for a low ratio
short term loan.
The banking crisis of 2001
appears to me to have been something related to the underdevelopment
of retail lending. The banks appear to have invested heavily in Turkish
government bonds chasing the high yield, only to be burnt as the value of
those bonds collapsed leaving them undercapitalized. Rather than limit withdrawals
as Argentina recently attempted, the Turkish government appears to have
printed the lira to pay everybody off, causing the lira to fall from about
625,000 to 1,250,000 to the buck. A more diversified retail portfolio wouldn't
probably have collapsed so catastrophically. Of course, anyone wanting to
get into banking in Turkey now can choose from any number of state owned
banks for sale.
Even if you think you know something about Islam, you
don't,
unless you've been to a Muslim country. And if you've been
to an Arab country, you still don't know anything about Turkey. Probably
the best way to explain this is in the political context. Most police walk
beats alone. They don't carry clubs or Mace. Maybe they could get their
gun out in five seconds or so using both hands. A traffic stop is done by
a policeman on the side of the road pointing to the car and gesturing it
to the side. And the car actually pulls over. In other words, people know
what they are supposed to do, and do it, to a greater extent than they do
in America. All of this is accomplished with a minimum of law enforcement,
because of a sort of social glue. Religion and family are part of that mix.
People take prayer breaks in the working day; not everyone, but a surprising
number. Oh, there is separation of church and state in Turkey, also freedom
of religious expression. You see the occasional church or synagogue, as
in America there are some mosques. In other words, Turkey is conservative
in the sense of our religious right. And it doesn't look too awful with
some exceptions.
The war on terrorism
The Turks have lost 30,000 in their war on terrorism. The guerrillas,
mostly Maoists like the Sendero Luminoso, go into a village, shoot the mayor,
the shopkeeper, the teacher, steal from the rest, go back to the hills and
call it the support of the people. The functional firearms in the hands
of the police and military are the automatic weapons intended to stop suicide
bombers. The Europeans agree to consider them freedom fighters as long as
they don't blow up bombs in their (EU) countries. But, the Turks also provide
no legitimate outlet for Kurdish ethnic feeling. The good news is as part
of their perpetual EU accession process they recently amended their constitution
to allow publication and broadcast in Kurdish. The Turks don't yet consider
this a key to ending their war, but the Israelis haven't grasped that the
way out of their problem is a strong secular state.
Islamism and the army
One of the European bugaboos about Turkey is its army, which
is large and has a large political role. What they don't "get"
is that Turkey is exceptional in the Near East because of that role. Ataturk
is arguably the most successful of the early 20th Century dictators. He
established a secular state and modernised or at least started to modernise
the country. My personal feeling is that he did a better job than Mussolini
or Hitler because he was a successful general, hated war, and, like Grant,
drank too much. The modern Turkish state is based on Ataturk's dictum, "Peace
at home, peace in the world" reinforced by the belief that the Turks
are a warrior people and that peace doesn't come unearned in a rough neighborhood.
The countercurrent has always been there. The Ottoman Empire was a theocracy,
with the Caliph, like an Islamic version of a medieval pope. Today, just
as in France, there are crowds of ladies with headscarves demonstrating
outside the college entrance examinations about the prohibition on wearing
those scarves during the test. Of course militarism and Islam mix just fine.
But successful military endeavor has been difficult for Islamic theocracies
for several centuries.The Kemalist revolution was from the top down. The
Sultan and Caliph were invited to leave, and did, with the retreating British
in 1922. Ataturk moved into the Dohlmabaci Palace. Today, the poorer and
less educated who are very numerous, consider their religion, perhaps, more
important than the secular legacy of Kemal Ataturk. The army, on their part,
see their duty to preserve that legacy. As in Switzerland, one of their
tools is conscription. While many Turks postpone their military service
as long as possible, many if not most still consider military service as
part of their national identity.
Anyway, those are a few impressions of someone who doesn't speak
the language and was there for three months...
