First step in sale of public facilities

ANKARA - Hürriyet

Hürriyet photo

The Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKI) is to put some 4,500 public housing units up for sale in concordance with recent government measures.

The public housing facilities in Ankara owned by the Finance Ministry have been transferred to TOKI as the first group of settlements to be put on the market, according to the protocol signed by TOKI and the General Directorate of National Real Estate. The housing facilities will be sold through a revenue-sharing model, after which they will be demolished and replaced by shopping malls and residence complexes.

The public houses in Ankara’s prestigious Oran neighborhood, where 182 high-ranking bureaucrats are accommodated, are among the roughly 4,500 buildings that were transferred to TOKI by the Finance Ministry.

The bureaucrats whose houses are to be dispossessed will be offered rental of TOKI houses built for middle-income citizens.

The first session of the tender for the housing area will be on Feb. 11 and open to foreign investors as well as domestic ones.

The sales of public facilities at city centers is expected to continue.

Recently, the Finance Ministry started to take an inventory of the public facilities used for public and military officials’ vacations after an outburst by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdoğan called the facilities a “waste of state money,” hinting that they would be privatized.

Erdoğan said last week that these facilities operated for just two months a year and were abandoned the rest of the time. He suggested that the state make deals with hotels on the same terms, suggesting that these holiday facilities might be sold in the future.

Following Erdoğan’s criticism, the Finance Ministry put the sale of 779 public facilities on its agenda.