How many benefitted from cheaper and more accessible housing as a result of the lax enforcement of building codes? I remain unconvinced that obscenely strict building codes are a net-positive.
"obscenely strict building codes are a net-positive"
Context matters and Turkey is a notorious earthquake area. What might be tolerable in Lithuania is criminal on an active fault line.
You haven't even demonstrated that the apartments were actually cheaper for the customers. They were cheaper to build, but their price was probably determined by the market and the notorious informational asymmetry, and the money saved by cheating might have been split between the developers and the crooked officials.
It is entirely possible that people paid through their nose for housing that would later kill them. If you look at the Chinese market, the "tou-fou dreg" buildings still command a premium price.
That doesn't matter because earthquake deaths are big and obvious and a bunch of homeless Turks/Kurds dying on the streets doesn't attract news. People see "house fall, housing bad" and then demand safer construction so the death will be hidden elsewhere.
"bunch of homeless Turks/Kurds dying on the streets"
Is that common in Turkey? It rather sounds like an American extrapolating from the situation on the Tenderloin.
In the Muslim world, extended families tend to stick together more than in the West and provide their members with some safety net. Your crazy uncle will have just a cot in a small side room, but won't be left alone in the street to fend for himself.
As far as my knowledge of the Muslim world goes, families seem to stick together way more than in Europe and won't simply let one of their own in the street.
I don't think the war can reliably be separated from the issue anywhere in the Turkey/Syria/Iraq region, but I saw some desperate housing on the outskirts of Qamishlo. I don't see how requiring sturdy housing would make the situation any better, as many families simply cannot afford it.
Also the Kurds, who are a big portion of inhabitants in South Turkey, tend to be less religious in general than residents of many of the ME countries. Plenty of non-muslims, orphans, etc.
That is what I have heard too, but family/society patterns tend to linger for a generation or two after the religiosity has subsided.
Czechia, where I live, has only about 13 per cent of self-declared Christians, but the main Christian holidays such as Easter and Christmas are still almost universally observed. The trace is still strong, even though the religious core has mostly evaporated.
"I don't see how requiring sturdy housing would make the situation any better, as many families simply cannot afford it."
I am not certain that the bad housing was actually much cheaper when sold than it would be if the codes were at least somewhat respected. People who do this kind of shady stuff will still try to sell at the highest possible market prices.
This is a notorious problem in China: very expensive apartments of horrible quality. Once a few crooks coordinate with the corrupt officials to capture the local market, you don't have much choice but to accept their conditions or go pound sand.
Yeah I totally acknowledge cultural aspects associated with religion live on. Of course your family has to have a place to invite the family in anyways, which they may or may not be able to afford the code house.
Corruption is another factor at play, but they can be confounding factors. This is evident when you see even SELF-BUILT homes often have to follow codes -- what is the owner supposed to be defrauding himself or something? Code are precisely why I haven't built my own home due to restrictions on minimum sq ft etc where I live as I could easily afford land and to build a house but not an up to code house so I'm stuck renting and losing lots more money in the process. And corruption cuts both ways -- giving more power and rules to zoning enforcement just gives opportunity for corruption to live with the zoning enforcement whereas having no zoning means no zoning enforcement people to corrupt.
In US code enforcement has initiated action to destroy tiny homes for homeless people etc which explicitly shows these people exposed to the elements as a result of code.
As for China, despite significant 'party' corruption, they have one of the highest family owned house ownership rates in the world, far surpassing US and Czechia. I would be very happy for us to have policies that end with such egalitarian home ownership.
I don't think it is absurd to require self-built homes to conform to universal codes. Builders-owners are the first inhabitants, but not necessarily the only ever inhabitants. Some other person/family may be living in them 5, 10 or 20 years from now, and having documentation that the original owner didn't cut corners when building the object reduces the "lemon market asymmetry" during the purchase process that is otherwise almost intractable.
CZ has about 78 per cent home ownership, China has 88. I am not sure whether the difference is so significant; it may reflect underlying differences in population migration (e.g. a lot of young Czechs go study to the traditional universities in Prague, Brno or Olomouc that are far from their family homes and obviously rent their rooms while there; maybe Chinese youngsters mostly study in their own city). We also have about 7 per cent of foreigners who are often transient and don't feel the need to buy any real estate; China doesn't.
OK so let me build the house and post the ~$10k bond to demolish the house once I'm dead. Since in my case the alternative is no new house at all it'd be back to where we started after I'm dead and in the meantime the place I'm renting opens up to someone else.
The handwaving about market asymmetry or whatever we all know is moving the goalposts from the corruption you were talking about earlier and easily bypassed anyway by posting a bond to demolish the house upon death/sale or other mechanisms like documentation of deviations or posting bond for special inspections upon transfer. In practice there's a place a few counties over from me that DOES do self-certification where they completely look the other way and all the crazy fears you have, haven't come to fruition and you can even transfer those houses unencumbered.
