Speaker
Description
Housing has been one of Türkiye's significant urban problems in recent decades. There are two broad categories of factors that directly influence this multifaceted problem. The supply-side factors are mainly the economic and institutional factors that aim to solve the problem by using the housing supply as a tool. Since high rents have been considered the primary cause of the high costs of daily living, central governments usually focused on increasing the housing supply to control high rents with the help of institutions like the Mass Housing Development Administration (TOKİ) and the municipalities. Demand-side factors, on the other hand, have a greater impact on the intensity of the housing problem since the housing supply, though it is increasing, can never meet the growing demand. Between the years 2000 and 2023, the overall population of Türkiye increased by approximately 35%, while the average household size dropped from 4.48 to 3.14 people. These demographic changes increased housing demand radically. Moreover, there has been an additional demand originating from the increasing number of immigrants in Türkiye and the ease of housing sales to foreigners. This unbalanced situation between housing supply and demand has artificially increased housing prices and consequently decreased homeownership rates, especially for certain socioeconomic groups. Between the years 2002 and 2025, the homeownership rate in Türkiye has decreased from 73.1% to 56.2%. This means that approximately 17% of the overall population, mostly low- and middle-income groups, have lost the chance to be homeowners. In this period, rental housing has appeared as one of the main solutions to the housing demands of these groups. However, it generated budgetary problems for those households since housing and rent expenditures account for the largest share of their consumption expenditures. Even though there are regulations to control the overall increase of rents, they are incapable because of the shortcomings of those regulations detected by the market actors. In these circumstances, the housing problem gradually turns into a housing crisis.
There are lots of studies focusing on housing problems in Türkiye. However, they generally study this issue at the national level and have limited emphasis on provincial differentiations of the problem. To overcome this limitation, this study aims to analyze provincial distributions of ownership statuses of residential units and reveal whether their spatial repercussions are similar in developed and underdeveloped provinces. There are three sections of the study. The first section contains a general quantitative description of the housing problem. With this description, it becomes possible to present different dimensions of the housing problem. The second section is the analytical section with its two parts. The first part aims to produce provincial profiles by considering the ownership statuses of residential units and the total number of households in each province. Consequently, these profiles are hierarchically clustered concerning their similarities, and the clusters are used to visualize provincial profiles. In the second part, these clusters are simultaneously evaluated with the socioeconomic development levels of provinces to understand whether there is a correlation between provincial profiles of ownership statuses and those development levels. Starting from the assumption that national housing policies are mostly inefficient, in the last section, there is a general discussion on housing policy that considers provincial differentiations.
References
Alkan, L. and Uğurlar, A. (2015) Türkiye'de Konut Sorunu ve Konut Politikaları. Ankara: Kent Araştırmaları Enstitüsü
Tekeli, İ. (2010) Konut Sorununu Konut Sunum Biçimleri ile Düşünmek. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları
İstanbul Planlama Ajansı (2021) Konut Sorunu Araştırması: İstanbul'da Mevcut Durum ve Öneriler. İstanbul: İPA Enstitü
Krapp, M. C., Vache, M., Egner, B., Schulze, K. and Thomas, S. (2020) Housing Policies in the European Union (conference version). Darmstadt: Institut Wohnen und Umwelt GmbH
| Keywords | housing problem; ownership status of residential unit; provincial differentiation |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
