Videos show Turkey's Erdogan boasted letting builders avoid earthquake codes
npr.org
npr.org
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 threw his biggest political opponent in jail so he can win the next presidential "election" in peace.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-steps-up-co...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
With foresight everyone knew it would end badly. The safety measures whose variances were being indulged were the result of bitter experience.
How much concrete (and GHG emission and coal inputs) were just wasted?
I would put the lives lost first on that list. The tragedy is incredible.
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.
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.
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!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collaps...
Costs are costs. If you need lower cost anything (healthcare, pharmaceuticals, housing) you will likely incur additional risks.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/12/turkey-arrests...
- "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."
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]
a. https://web.archive.org/web/20220121110007/https://ec.europa...
b. https://web.archive.org/web/20201218132551/https://ec.europa...
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.
It's unclear whether Erdogan has the legal power to delay the elections (scheduled for May), but his political allies have publicly advanced the idea.
The people from the region affected by the earthquake represent an important percentage of his voter base.
Now, the question is whether will he go for electoral fraud, or leave his post knowing for sure that a jail term awaits him.
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.
If you try to eliminate bureaucracy, you very quickly find out what it was all for.
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.
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
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.
I don't see how Turkey would commit to such an economic turnaround.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/World_rai...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/what-qualifies-as-a-bed...
[1] https://www.realtor.com/advice/sell/what-is-a-bedroom-featur...
[2] https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/SFH_POLI_APPR_PROP.PDF
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.
Some municipalities might - I couldn't find any data in a few minutes of googling.
[1] https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/trump-administration-loos...
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_tax_(Turkey)
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155647266/turkey-earthquake-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art#Cultural_Bolshe...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...