Do-It-Yourself Construction Policy Spelled Doom for Quake Victims : Regulation: Erecting buildings didn’t require a licensed contractor, an architect or strict standards. The government granted amnesty for shoddily built dwellings.

Somehow, despite the great tragedy, Omer Alkanlar is still a man of respect in the seaside quarter known as Sixty Houses.

Townspeople address the 76-year-old patriarch as Haci Omer, a title that recognizes his many pilgrimages to Mecca, Islam’s holiest shrine. They have named the street he lives on Haci Omer Street, in honor of his civic accomplishments, which include organizing Derince’s central market.

But the Aug. 17 earthquake highlighted Alkanlar’s most dubious achievement: He helped turn a safe, low-rise neighborhood into a jungle of towering deathtraps. Five of his buildings collapsed in the temblor, and two occupants were killed.

In a country of 65 million people, Alkanlar is one of an estimated 400,000 builders and, like most of them, he is an amateur. With their proliferation in recent years, Turkey’s housing market has evolved into a dangerously unregulated mess.

Many builders whose shoddily constructed residential towers crumbled in the quake have gone into hiding to avoid the fury of clients who lost their homes and loved ones. But Alkanlar, who is under investigation by Derince’s prosecutor, sat in front of his home on a plastic lawn chair--a serene, Buddha-like figure with brown sandals and a trim white beard.

A crowd gathered as the big man received a visiting reporter. They listened with deference and nodded in agreement as he held forth on the disaster and its horrendous human toll, which included 1,350 deaths in their neighborhood alone.

“This is something Allah decided,” he said flatly.

Maybe so, but one of the most devastated spots in Turkey’s quake-stricken northwest--the Sixty Houses neighborhood--was definitely the creation of do-it-yourself builders like Alkanlar, whose energy and ambition were too much for the state that was supposed to control them.

“I’m not a builder but a merchant,” Alkanlar admitted. The ground floors of his apartment blocks are occupied by shops from which he supplies much of the town’s kitchen appliances and bicycles.

Erecting the buildings, it seems, doesn’t require a licensed contractor, an architect or strict adherence to Turkey’s nationwide building standards. “I round up building tradesmen in the market--there are always enough--and I buy the necessary concrete and iron. . . . Then it’s their project.”

Alkanlar denies the assertion of an aggrieved client that he once boasted, “Money does everything here.” But the Derince City Council, with few questions asked, routinely approved his plans--a fact he points out in his own defense.

Do-it-yourself construction caught on big in Turkey after World War II, when rural migrants to the cities invaded vacant state-owned land and put up their own squatter shacks. The illegal settlements became known as gecekondu, Turkish for “landed overnight.”

Instead of fighting the gecekondu, the state institutionalized it with a series of amnesty laws that bestowed belated land titles and municipal services on the squatters--and encouraged new invasions. As the number of migrants swelled, support for amnesties--there have been 15 since 1948--became obligatory for any politician seeking office.

The gecekondu evolved into multistory apartment blocks, whose builders continued to ignore government codes. Instead of cracking down, officials in 1984 began applying amnesties to all illegal building in Turkey.

“The gecekondu problem spread to the entire housing sector,” said Ayse Bugra, an economics professor at Istanbul’s Bosporus University. “Breaking the rules became normal everywhere.”

Official laxity was compounded that same year when the central government gave municipalities power to issue construction permits. Most city halls lacked qualified inspectors to enforce the codes--and still do.

The resulting breakdown of urban order is clearly visible in Sixty Houses. In 1984, the neighborhood was exactly that--60 small homes by the Marmara Sea, where construction was limited by law to one- and two-story buildings; the ground was considered too soft to support anything taller.

As migrants poured in to work at a nearby oil refinery, the neighborhood began sprouting upward like an awkward teenager. Under pressure from builders such as Alkanlar, the City Council raised the maximum height to three stories, then four, then six. Confident of future amnesties, the builders built even higher and people kept moving in; a local politician recently began putting up twin 10-story apartment towers.

When last month’s quake hit Turkey, at least 80 tall buildings crashed in the neighborhood, burying occupants as they slept.

“I’m not surprised,” said Eyup Gunay, a 44-year-old engineer who lived in one of Alkanlar’s flattened buildings but was away on vacation. “I’ve seen too many unbelievable things here.”

The original Sixty Houses remained intact.