Housing policies in Turkey post 2002

Abstract

Turkey, under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), has launched large-scale national housing programmes in line with the emerging international trend in low-income housing provision. This paper analyses the place of the government’s housing programmes in economic policy and in the international context to illustrate the overall picture of the Turkish housing policy in the AKP era. Housing programmes have enabled low and middle-income people to access homeownership. However, other areas of housing policy such as land provision, taxes, subsidies, or housing finance have ignored the housing needs of low-income households. The case of Turkey reveals that the area on which the government should focus for low-income housing provision is access to affordable finance.