Rent Freeze Urged for Quake Zone : Turkey: Newspaper calls for government controls as survivors of the disaster scramble to find affordable housing in buildings left standing.

A leftist newspaper urged a rent freeze in quake-stricken areas Friday as survivors in western Turkey’s quake zone rushed to find apartments in buildings left standing.

Rents have doubled in many apartment blocks and houses that withstood the Aug. 17 earthquake because of their better construction. Costs for moving trucks have also skyrocketed.

The increases have taken prices of available housing well beyond the means of Turkey’s working class, who at minimum wage make just $170 a month.

On the outskirts of the hard-hit city of Izmit this week, increases in rent at a still-standing cluster of apartment houses shut out would-be renter Banu Diyarbakir. “The rents went up from $225 to $560” a month, Diyarbakir said.

With Diyarbakir’s father bringing in only $290 a month in retirement pay, the rent increases were enough to keep Diyarbakir’s family from leaving the sidewalk in front of their ruined home where they have set up camp.

Turkey’s Evrensel daily urged authorities to freeze rents, blaming the government for prices that have reached “astronomic amounts.”

Some housing experts have urged the government to provide rent aid for quake victims, saying it would be better to put up survivors in available housing than to build temporary winter settlements of prefabricated houses, as the government plans.

Western Turkey’s magnitude 7.4 quake left more than half a million people homeless. On Friday, the official death toll reached 16,695. Thousands more are missing.

Foreign Minister Ismail Cem, speaking in Britain on Friday, estimated the cost of rebuilding at $8 billion. Others have put the cost as high as $25 billion. The government said preliminary official damage assessments should be ready by Monday.

Many quake victims complained that they were still waiting for tents more than two weeks after the disaster.

Government relief groups have set up some of the tent cities for quake victims at suitable sites in remote areas, intending to ferry victims there. But the transportation has yet to be fully organized, and some of the tent cities stand empty, far from where quake victims are living in patched-together shelters of their own making.

At one, 350 waterproof tents stood empty, waiting for victims from Istanbul’s Avcilar district. Those victims were still seven miles away, camped in huts of plastic-covered cardboard and scrap wood.