On 8 September the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change announced that the Yarısı Bizden (“Half on Us”) campaign will run for one more year; the end date has moved from 31 December 2026 to 31 December 2027. That is the news. The real question is who gains how much time from this extra year. Since the campaign began in February 2024, 435,683 independent units in Istanbul have been brought into its scope and 108,881 of them have been completed. The gap between the two numbers is made up of buildings that have not yet been demolished, or have not yet obtained their permit; they are the ones the extension is really addressed to. For a building that does not even hold a risk report today, fifteen months is not breathing space but a timetable to be walked step by step.
What one more year buys
The terms of the campaign have not changed. In every district of Istanbul, owners of homes in buildings declared at risk receive, per independent unit, a grant of 875,000 TL, a loan of 875,000 TL and 125,000 TL in relocation support; for commercial units the grant and the loan are halved and the relocation support stays the same. Loan repayment begins two years after the building permit is issued and runs over ten years, interest-free in the first year and indexed to half the inflation rate thereafter. The application is not a pre-registration on e-Devlet; it is a process that runs through the district municipality once the building has been declared at risk.
The one condition that concerns the architect directly is about floor area: the new building, excluding parking and shelter, may not exceed one and a half times the area of the building demolished. Most owners overlook this sentence, yet it sets the skeleton of the project. Some of the apartment buildings around Bağdat Caddesi sit below what today’s zoning plan allows, built at the looser density of the 1960s and 70s. The difference between what the plan grants and what the campaign permits creates a choice: forgo the grant and use the full development right, or take the grant and build a smaller building. Making that choice well requires drawing both first; a decision taken without two preliminary designs side by side usually turns into a revision round later.
On Bağdat Caddesi the timetable runs differently
In Caddebostan, Suadiye, Erenköy, Göztepe and Fenerbahçe, plot-scale transformation has a rhythm of its own. Land values are high, buildings have many owners, apartments are large and most have passed down from their first owner. When these three come together, the longest step is not technical but human: getting the owners to agree. The rule that came with the amendment to Law No. 6306, allowing owners to decide by a simple majority of shares once the building is declared at risk, shortened this step but did not remove it; the implementing regulation in force since 4 February 2026 gave the owners’ meeting a formal procedure and requires the call to be made through the neighbourhood headman’s notice board or a notary at least fifteen days in advance. The decision got faster, but its timetable is now bound to a procedure.
There is another difference on the Caddesi. The support the campaign pays per independent unit is the same everywhere in Istanbul; here, however, the grant covers a smaller share of what an apartment costs to build than it does in other parts of the city. So on Bağdat Caddesi the campaign is rarely the main source financing the project; more often it is a line item that shifts the balance in the land-share negotiation between owners and contractor. A cost table that counts the grant and the loan leads owners to give up fewer apartments under the same conditions. Our Hakkı Bey Apartment and the Mutluş Apartment in Suadiye are two examples of how this balance shows in the façade and the plan; our other apartment projects in Kadıköy are gathered on our Kadıköy urban transformation map page.
“When will we know?”
This is almost always the owner’s first question, and the honest answer depends on where in the process the building stands. A risk report prepared by a licensed firm comes back within a few weeks; approval by the provincial directorate, notification to the owners and the fifteen-day objection period usually take one to two months. Once the decision is final, an annotation is entered on the title deed and the way to the district municipality application opens. Then comes the owners’ meeting: at least fifteen days of notice, the meeting, a decision by simple majority, and notification of the owners who did not attend. How long this step takes is set not by the regulation but by the building itself; in a well-prepared building it is over in a few weeks, in an unprepared one it drags on for months. Once the contractor and the architect are chosen, three to six months is a realistic allowance for drawing the project, collecting the opinions of the relevant authorities and obtaining the permit.
Add these up and a building that moves without a hitch reaches its permit eight months to a year after the risk report. With the campaign now ending on 31 December 2027, a building that has no report today needs its risk decision final and its owners’ decision taken by spring 2027. It should be added that which step has to be completed by the last day may vary with the district municipality’s practice; that is why it is safer to build the timetable not around the deadline but a few months ahead of it.
How to read the extension
The extension itself says something. In a campaign where 435,683 independent units have been taken into scope but 108,881 completed, three quarters of the buildings that entered are still under construction or at the start. Another year was necessary so that these buildings were not left halfway; opening room for new entrants is its second effect. The Ministry’s target of 500,000 homes by the end of 2026 points the same way: the process is getting longer because the work itself is long.
For an apartment building on Bağdat Caddesi the consequence is plain. The campaign takes in the building that decides today and leaves the one that postpones to the uncertainty of the next extension. The architect’s place in this timetable begins before the risk report: putting two preliminary designs side by side, showing where the one-and-a-half limit and the development right fall, and going to the owners’ meeting with numbers. The decision belongs to the owners; the drawings and the figures that decision needs should be on the table from the start.