Would I rather save time or money? Which is more valuable to me? Which do I feel is in short supply? Of course, most of us believe we could use more of both. Time is doled out to all of us equally; today I have 24 hours and so do you. That's the total supply, and there is no more. The supply of money, however, is totally elastic. You might stick with the same old salary, or find TL 10 on the street, or get an unexpected legacy from a rich uncle or win the lottery. Some people try to rig the odds, rob the central bank foreign reserves depository, for example. Successful bank robbers get more money; unsuccessful ones suddenly have more “free” time to think about safer ways to get rich quick.
I've decided to save time and money by taking advantage of the recent flood and buy some distressed property out in Çatalca. The state meteorologists categorized it as a 500-year flood, meaning there is only a 0.2 percent chance of such a flood happening in any given year. I'll save money because it will be a distress sale, and I'll save time because I won't have to look all over İstanbul for a place, just that one area.
The experts could be wrong, however. For example, someone estimated the damages from the flood at $70-80 million, but I have a friend who lost millions out there on his farm alone, so I figure the estimate was low. If it should happen that we get another heavy flood next year, that means I am out serious time and money, plus the risk to life and limb.
I lived through a 500-year flood once before in Tucson, Ariz., back in 1983. Similar rainfall, two months' worth in a day, washed out interstate bridges and not a few buildings. I remember standing by the Rillito River and watching a chunky apartment building fold into the water as the opposite bank collapsed under it. At the same time, I saw a metal dumpster floating, borne along by the current until it slammed into a bridge pylon -- Bong! The bridge survived the hit, but I thought the boobs standing on the bridge were good candidates for natural selection in Darwin's theory of evolution. As I recall, the police made those idiots clear the structure shortly after that incident.
In Tucson we used to make fun of Phoenix, the state capital that had mushroomed beyond natural capacity and become an ugly blotch on the desert. Tucson in those days was the fastest developing place in the entire United States, so our smug appreciation of “real” desert living was already doomed. When I moved there, my grandmother asked me what I was doing in that cowtown -- she'd driven through in 1920.
Last time I visited I was horrified to see how vast stretches of pristine Sonoran Desert on the east side of the city had been carpeted over with single-story ranch homes, thousands of acres. Now they've done it, for all the housing has changed the climate in the valley. If you moved there for the clean air, you lost.
That brings me to all this talk of time and money, time versus money. I think many of us are coming to realize that there are more important things in life. The earth is proving itself unable to sustain the kind of life we have built on the combustion of fossil fuels -- even without global warming, you can see that our cities need help.
Which brings me to our own megalopolis, one of the largest spreads of urban development on the planet. Do we really want that third bridge over the Bosporus at Tarabya-Beykoz? As I recall, the tunnel was supposed to obviate the need for another bridge.
They say that the construction won't hurt the forest, they'll limit development. Urban planning, that's a good thing. We can afford to build the bridge; we have the time. But do we really have any more İstanbul to trash?
