Welcome to Atasehir, a growing commercial district on the city’s Asian side.

Look out the window of my classroom, there just past the yellow crane in the foreground. That huge construction site in the distance.What you’re looking at is the future site of what people here are calling Istanbul’s Wall Street.

Officially it will be called the Istanbul International Finance Center, a massive, multi-billion-dollar bid by Turkey to become one of the world’s financial centers, on par with New York, London and Tokyo.

The project is set to be finished in the next couple years, and will consolidate the Istanbul Borsa (Stock Market), as well as most of the country’s banking institutions, with hopes of drawing an increasing number of international banking and financial institutions as well. A similar financial center already is up and running in Dubai (the DIFC), which Turk business leaders hope will not be a rival, but rather a “complement” to the new one here.

Hard to believe it’s all happening right outside my window.

“Maybe when it’s finished, we can start having some students there,” I say to one of our office assistants.

“Yes, maybe,” she says. We both laugh. But then again, why not? It is to be an international finance center after all. While Turkish, Arabic, German, French and Chinese all have their place in the world of finance, it is English that continues to be the lingua franca, and should remain so for some time.

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I’m not sure if President-elect Donald Trump has ever been to Istanbul, but he should put a trip here high on his list.

Why? Because what you are looking at, friends, is Trump’s dream, as well as his nightmare. All this construction, this industry – why is it happening here, and not back in, say, Pittsburgh or Detroit?

You remember the campaign. How often did Trump, especially during the debates, go on and on about China, about Dubai, about the “rest of the world,’ (which I would presume to include Istanbul)?

They’re killing us, he said. They’re building, they’re growing. Airports, bridges, roads. America has become a Third World country, folks. How often did we hear him go on and on about it?

He’s right. Looking out my school window, yes, this is what he’s talking about. This is the world as Trump sees it. America – and the West, for that matter – is getting weaker, in his view, while places like Istanbul every day grow stronger. It’s a view shared by many in this part of the world as well.

View of the third Bosphorus Bridge, which opened up earlier this year.

If he does visit as president, I’m sure Trump will be impressed. How could he not be? He loves to build things. Here, you see nothing but that.

And not just the future IIFC. I’m talking about the third Bosphorus Bridge, on the north side of the city, a majestic Golden Gate-style structure that opened earlier this year.

I’m talking about the third international airport, which is set to open next year. And the ever-expanding metro system, a system that now links two continents and is one of the world’s deepest, running under the gun-metal grey waters of the Bosphorus. A tunnel beneath the Bosphorus for cars and trucks, is also set to open. The list goes on and on.

I sometimes imagine what the younger version of Trump would have done had he been here now. He probably would have invested. Construction, and by extension, real estate – his passion, his bread and butter, the source of his great wealth – is the biggest sector in Istanbul, in Turkey, along with energy. Everywhere you go in this city, day and night, the work just goes on and on. It’s a great, unfinished city.

Halic metro by night.

You’d think that with a civil war in Syria just over the border, terrorism in the east, and the fall-out of the failed military coup here last July, which resulted in a reported 300 deaths, and thousands of arrests and dismissals, would put a check on all this growth. And don’t forget about my associates – Turkish journalists – more than 100 of them have been thrown in jail. News organizations not following the party line have been raided, shut down, reopened “under new management.”

I mean, yes, the political fall-out, the instability, have had some effects. There have been the usual reprimands, lectures, reprisals, from the West, and the Turkish lira has fallen against the dollar and euro. Shaken nerves have rattled some foreign investors (as well as those of my colleagues, many of whom have either already left the country or are planning to leave).

But none of these terrible events, or the aftershocks, seem to have had any noticeable effect on the sound of those hammers, saws and cranes outside my window. The work just goes on and on. It sort of reminds you of New York during the Great Depression, when millions were out of work, and yet those skyscrapers in Manhattan – notably the Empire State – kept on rising.

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The man behind this ambition is, of course, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Since Trump’s election, many Turks here have liked Trump to Erdogan, as well as to Turkish real estate and development magnate Ali Agaoglu.

“Trump is a strong man, like Erdogan,” they say.

Already, Erdogan has invited Trump to visit Turkey, if not after Election Day then before. The sooner the better. Erdogan has said he is optimistic that U.S.-Turk relations – a very strategic partnership in this war-ravaged part of the world – could improve under a Trump presidency.

That of course, remains to be seen. I’ve lived here long enough to know that you can never predict how things are going to turn out – “Don’t trust Istanbul weather or women,” the locals saying goes. But as I look out my window at the ever-growing Istanbul skyline – it’s like watching one of those fast-growing movies – I can see the two big men may well be able to see eye to eye.

As far as Trump goes, as I said, I think the energy in this part of the world, the industry, the ambition, is what he’s hungry to bring back to America. He’d like to get those hammers and saws and cranes, the fire of American industry, glowing, as it is in this part of the world.

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That’s not an ignoble ambition. But there are things that Trump perhaps misses, or doesn’t see. For one, a lot of the construction here is done, as it is in many parts of the world, by low-paid, unskilled workers, often working in substandard, dangerous conditions. For example, a couple years ago, nearly a dozen workers were killed when an elevator broke, and they fell hundreds of feet to their deaths. Day in and out, I pass construction sites where I see men welding without any safety equipment at all. Sparks fly out, nearly hitting passing pedestrians. (Actually, in a perverse way, I don’t mind this: It’s like, use your common sense and just cross the street, rather than call the OSHA. Those guys have families to feed, right?)

I wonder if Trump will be able to bring back the construction, the manufacturing, the industry, that he desires, though, when confronted with the realities of the global marketplace. One of the (debatable) advantages of places like Istanbul is that they don’t have the strict building codes, the time-consuming and costly permitting processes that places like California have. OK, to be fair, they do have these processes in Istanbul, too, but corruption is not uncommon. Regulations here would seem to be negotiable.

These practices have had devastating consequences. One recalls the 1999 Istanbul earthquake, in which nearly 20,000 people perished. Many of those deaths may have been prevented, but the problem was that shoddy construction and questionable building code enforcement resulted in buildings that just flat-out collapsed like a house of cards when the ‘quake struck.

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One of Trump’s big challenges, if he wants to bring these grand, ambitious projects back to America, is being able to balance the jobs and other economic benefits, with the health and safety, as well as environmental effects.

But then again, Trump knows that, or should anyway. As he so often boasts, he has been in this business his whole career. He should know what he’s up against.

At any rate, I’d advise him to take President Erdogan up on his recent invitation as soon as possible. He should make a visit to Istanbul high on his list. If nothing else, if not a chance to deal with the civil war in Syria, ISIS in Iraq (Turkey is a partner on both fronts), it would be an opportunity for Trump to get an up close and personal glimpse of Erdogan’s Turkey, which has a lot of the same ambitions and dreams, as well as energy, that he has. But it might also give him pause, to reflect on the obstacles, as well as the risks, of trying to realize those same dreams back home in Trump’s America.

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James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident, is a writer and teacher in Istanbul.