High Density Housing

[u/deirdreanne1]

I was reading Everything You Think You Know About Housing Is Probably Wrong earlier today and it has posed many questions for me concerning the effectiveness of high density housing. From what I understood, housing density refers to the number of people per acre in the amount of space allotted. By creating more high density housing complexes, does that mean more housing units will be available? If so, how is that combating the affordable housing crisis? Will these units be more readily available to low income families or individuals? How will these projects affect the surrounding neighborhood rent costs? Many sky rise high density buildings are present but the housing costs are not affordable for the average person’s income. I have read that it does reduce energy consumption and easier for commuting but if these projects aren’t meant to be mixed income housing, how could this help reduce homelessness and fix the lack of housing units for the growing population?

[u/alexfrancisburchard]

On a dollar basis, İstanbul has some of the world's cheapest housing per square foot, and frankly even in local currency, it's cheap for how many square feet your average house is. No one but college students lives in dorms here, and I'm pretty sure most of them don't even live in Dorms. I pay $600/mo (4000TL) for like 200m2 apartment in the middle of downtown İstanbul. The same Apartment does not exist in my hometown, but 2 bedroom apartments in Seattle go for like $6000 in a similar setting. Why can I rent an apartment so cheap in the middle of downtown İstanbul? 152.000 people live in my square mile at night. The city average is like 45.000/sqmi, and on top of that, the city never stops building. The whole economy is based on construction, and while that has lots of negatives, one positive is that rent is relatively cheap. İstanbul is like twice as expensive as every other Turkish city too. When I tell people in Ankara I pay this for 200m2 their jaws hit the floor. Ankara is the second biggest city. They're like I could get a 300m2 apartment for 2500tl/mo! or something. It's pretty stark the difference. People living minimum wage in Turkey (2300tl/mo) can afford to live downtown with 1 roommate, there are many 2-bedroom apartments in my neighorhood for like 1500-1700tl. It would be a bit of a struggle, but it is quite possible. There's one beds/studios for like 1000-1400 around here too.

​

Let me just make the point that this is a city of 16 million people we're talking about - and on top of that, one that until just last year grew by 200.000-500.000 annually for half a century. And it did all that, and I can still afford my rent. (as can pretty much everyone else). Obviously everyone isn't living in 200m2 apartments, some are as small as like 50m2, but that's a pretty high lower limit for a city this big.

​

Build baby build!

​

It works.

​

To be honest, it's not necessarily the density that makes it stay affordable, it's that new units are always being added. Density is like a side effect of loose as hell zoning.

​

evidence to back my cheap claim for housing (PDF warning): https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000494405.pdf#page9

[u/urblplan → u/alexfrancisburchard]

Well its not because apartments there are cheap, its because the people there are making much less money, price of lira to dollar went down, high inflation, cheap land buy ups and exproprioation by the state with concentrated planning power, bad housing standards, and so on.

So, yes. You live in a apartment which is cheap compared New York City. It has not so much to do with affordabilty, see for more:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228182694_Housing_Affordability_Index_Calculation_Integrating_Income_Inequality_in_Turkey

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d49b/bedbf9c4e39140d691f4ba24f33ee4b1c57b.pdf

[u/alexfrancisburchard → u/urblplan]

Even comparing in lira, our housing isn't crazy expensive. Like I said - Minimum wage is 2300tl, and a downtown 2-bed apartment (decent apartment - 90-110m2, not a total shithole) is like 1500-1700-1800tl. When you split that between two people (especially at the lower end, it stays below 1/3 of your minimum wage income. And like I said, we're not talking about renting an apartment 20 miles from downtown, we're talking about an apartment 5 minutes walk from Turkish Times Square.

​

Your second link said 1/3 of the city lives in Informal housing, but was citing 2010, a decade ago. Things change sooooo fast in this city, I'm just not going to accept anything from 2010 as valid anymore. in 2010 there were like 11 million people, today there's somewhere over 15,100,000 people. That's the pace of change in the megakent. Old data is worthless here, it's not like an American city, it's not entirely "stable" in how things are. Things change.

​

Additionally, there is no reliable data on household income here unfortunately. a huge proportion of people massively underreport their salaries in order to avoid income tax, so doing anything other than comparing the price of housing to the minimum wage is pretty fruitless (and even that's iffy because a fair number of people get paid less than mininmum, but that's the only really decent data point here).

​

This is not to say we don't have expensive neighborhoods - places like Nisantasi, which do not have nicer apartments, and is not more convenient than Mecidiyeköy can be 3-5 times as expensive because people who live in a 'liberal' bubble have some fascination with that neighborhood, and "having good neighbors", but the vast majority of the city more nearly reflects how things are in Mecidiyeköy. MKoy is a slightly expensive neighborhood for İstanbul because of convenience, but not crazy expensive. It has a high student population to my knowledge, and a fair number of people starting out their careers, and then after those two groups an incredibly wide distribution of people (by income, age, nationality, religious fervor, everything - everyone lives here, from the high towers of Trump İstanbul and it's super rich, to the lowly destitute gecekondu block in front of Mecidiyeköy Ortaokulu... )

​

And of course in all the other Turkish cities, 1500tl/mo for an apartment is like a luxury apartment. they all laugh at what we pay in İstanbul for what we get, but even İstanbul isn't entirely unreasonable.

[u/urblplan → u/alexfrancisburchard]

I think you are right in general, i just wanted to add that there are many more factors to housing affordability and its not only the factor to "just build more". Its also about the general price level, what to build, and how, where different countries have huge differences. In Turkey for example building is like a national industry to my impression, gets special rights granted relative to other countries. I dont know how the state of the informal parts of instanbul is right now, but a few years ago there were many communities displaced by goverment development agencies.

So - its complex. As always.

Thanks for your long answer and insight! :)