Between Rights-Based or Profit-Based Housing: An Examination of the Turkish State’s Role in the Financialization of the ‘Affordable’ Housing Market

With the crash of the US mortgage market in 2007 the seriousness of the symbiotic and mutually (de)constructive relationship between the finance and real estate markets in the Global North became ineluctable. And when it comes to the Global South, late-comer states are argued to be in the process of building a ‘transparent mortgage market’ without prioritizing the disastrous results of transforming housing into an instrument subject to financial speculation. Based on a year-long field research on the Mass Housing Market in Turkey, the paper asks the following question: “How should we understand the Turkish State’s role in the financializing the affordable housing market for the poor?”

The case of Turkish Mass Housing Administration (TMHA) brings interesting insights for understanding the nation state’s role in the financialization of affordable housing for the lower income classes. On the one hand, Turkish state has maintained a ‘rights-based’ discourse as it argues that TMHA, as welfare state institution, prioritizes the demands of the ‘targeted masses in need’ with the promise of solving housing problem for the poor. On the other hand, TMHA created huge numbers of indebted poor through re-commodification of the shanty houses which are already owned by the poor. That is, urban regeneration is used as a main housing policy tool by TMHA to dispossess the poor and integrate them into the financial markets.

By looking at the relation between rights-based discourse and profit-based implementation of Turkish state’s housing policies, this paper argues that right to housing, as the right to control the concreteness of our livelihood, should be prioritized over the new financialized visions of housing policies.