Housing Issues

Trundling up the hill on my way back from the shops recently, I rounded a corner and bumped into one of my last remaining neighbors heaving a mattress through the gate of a house other than the one in which I normally see her.

“We had to move,” she explained when I looked at her quizzically. “They're starting building work any day now.”

She was one of the small number of people living in Göreme who still rented a property here, and of course any property in the old part of the village that is rented out is always at risk of being sold as a new hotel these days. To be fair, I'm not entirely sure if it was her home that was being turned into a hotel or whether it was the prospect of noisy work going on in a building nearby that had caused her to move. Either way, she didn't seem particularly thrilled at what had happened. The new house, it seemed, was smaller than the old one, but with rents rising inexorably that too was probably inevitable.
Just a few days later I was starting down the hill again when I saw a tractor pulled up in front of a house that was another new hotel project that started, then stalled, and has since stood in seeming limbo. The trailer attached to the tractor was piled high with household goods and a human chain of family members was strung out across the street, passing along yet more items to join them. With a heavy heart I realized that that meant yet another family was leaving.
It seems a lifetime ago now that I was buying my own house and fretting that, by paying slightly over the odds to secure it, I risked pushing up prices so that locals would be unable to afford to buy, a scenario familiar from parts of the UK popular with second-home owners. How naive that seems now! At that time the handful of foreign buyers was paying the odd thousand lira or so more than a local would have done for the same house. The real threat was the one that none of us foresaw, which was that every house would become a potential hotel, its price adjusted upwards to reflect its value as a business investment.

It's a scenario that is being repeated all over Turkey in small settlements where tourism is booming. Şirince, Alaçatı, Bozcaada, Taraklı -- all had only limited housing stock as well as rigid rules to preserve their appearance. Now, like Göreme, all are having to come to terms with the fact that what that means ultimately is that all the locals will cash in on the increased value of their homes and move out, that their homes will then become hotels and restaurants, and that it will become virtually impossible for anyone to afford to move to and live in them any more.

There is said to be a street in Uçhisar full of Göremelis who've been priced out of Göreme and have moved into cheaper housing in the next village up the road. Meanwhile, Nevşehir and Avanos have been the main beneficiaries of the Göreme exodus. Recently I heard that planning consent has been given for new houses on the eastern side of the village. On the one hand I don't think any more building will improve its appearance. On the other hand people have to live somewhere…

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave house in Göreme in Cappadocia.

PAT YALE (Cihan/Today's Zaman)