Erdoğan unveils major public housing project

ANKARA

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unveiled the “largest social housing project in Türkiye’s history,” which aims to help low-income citizens own houses and tackle problems regarding property prices and rents.

“This campaign represents the largest housing investment in the world in terms of number and quality. We are proud to enter the 100th anniversary of our Republic with such a global and historically significant campaign,” Erdoğan said at the debut of the social housing project.

The government will lay the first foundation of these projects at the beginning of 2023, he said noting that its applications will start on Sept. 14 and will last until the end of October.

“Our aim is to complete the first stage residences within a maximum of two years and hand them over to our eligible citizens,” he added.

Their target is to build 500,000 social housing, and 50,000 workplaces, also provide 250,000 residential land plots, in 81 provinces in five years covering 2023-2028, the president explained.

Thus, they will have increased the number of social housings that have been constructed since the beginning of 2003 to 2 million, and the number of citizens living in them, together with other projects, to over 10 million, Erdoğan stated.

“We have determined the name of our project and the residences and workplaces to be built within this scope as ‘My First Home,’ ‘My First Work Place,’” he added.

Of the first phase residences, they will construct 50,000 in Istanbul, 18,000 in Ankara, 12,500 in İzmir, 10,000 in Gaziantep, 8,650 in Bursa, 7,500 in Konya and 4,500 of them in Kayseri, Erdoğan said.

The prices will start from 608,000 Turkish Liras, workplaces from 350,000 liras, and infrastructure lands from 192,500 liras. Those with a household income below 18,000 liras in Istanbul and 16,000 in other provinces will be able to benefit from the campaign.

“As has been the case in every area in the past two decades, we have introduced a century’s worth of services, works and projects in social housing in Türkiye,” he stated.

Erdoğan noted that so far, a total of 1.17 million houses, 90 percent of which were social housing, had been built by the Housing Development Administration (TOKİ) in Türkiye.

“We have built giant hospitals equipped with all the requirements of the time, tens of thousands of places of work, thousands of public buildings, stadiums and hundreds of social and cultural facilities for people of every segment of society,” he said.