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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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But the man does own the courts and pretty much all politicians, so there's very little anyone can do.

He threw his biggest political opponent in jail so he can win the next presidential "election" in peace.

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.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkey-steps-up-co...

Well, I mean, they should be, too. Nothing forcing them to request such an "amnesty" except greed.

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 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.

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)

> 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.

Ah, I suspected that might be the case. My reading of the parent did suggest "real estate developer" to me, for what it's worth.

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.

> 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.

It starts with one nail in the coffin, then another one, then another one.. Eventually most autocrats ends up badly after some time.

Not just in hindsight. Buildings not built to code crumbling when an inevitable earthquake hits was foreseeable.

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...

We had a similar story in Belgium.

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

> it's actually accurate

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?

It works as "you built your building, we will allow you to keep it and legalize it"

The Italian equivalent is 'sanification', so yes.

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...

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.

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.

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.

One could argue that turkey started doing well with Erdogan, at least initially. He then somehow decided that he wants to become an emperor.

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.

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.

Just call them "indulgences" to align with history.

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?

> 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.

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