Housing Needs in Hungary
Introduction:
Habitat for Humanity is a non-profit international agency aimed at improving housing conditions across the globe for those in greatest need. It is sponsored by charitable donations but appears to have support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for its lending projects and has a number of protocols with the United Nations social care programmes. Habitat commissioned the leading Hungarian housing research body, Budapest-based Metropolitan Research Institute (MRI), to mount a wide-ranging study of housing conditions and problems in Hungary. MRI’s detailed report describes and sums up what it sees as the country’s key housing problems.
What Is Housing:
The report presents a huge amount of data and figures on various aspects of Hungarian housing. Essentially, this is a factual report and reflects the nature of the work as a commissioned empirical study. However, this format also raises a number of difficulties for the reader. First, the document lacks historical context. It is apparent to this reader that Hungary’s historical legacy remains very prominent in the contemporary story and, especially for newcomers to this country or to post communism in general, it was necessary to include more background information and perhaps rather more about the country as a whole.
Housing Subsidies:
To read the narrative on housing subsidies without knowing the legacy from the communist period – which is still very apparent because the best housing and the best of the new state-built flats in the 1970s and 1980s with central locations were allocated to favored party members and the ‘new’ middle class and it was only in the final phase of state building in the mid-1980s that allocation became more socially diverse. State rental flats were rapidly privatised in the early 1990s putting high-value equity in the pockets of the political classes but leaving many of the peripheral high-rise estates in a dreadful condition with no local authority services, almost no social housing and a practically non-functioning private rental sector.
Structural Problem In The Housing Market:
The large quantity of small, low-amenity flats built between the 1960s and the 1980s also continue to be a major factor despite construction of a new wave of larger properties in the 1990s. There is still a structural problem in the housing market with an excess supply of these flats and insufficient ‘up-market’ property. The middle classes have continued to benefit the most from this situation (as they did under the communist system when they creamed off a high proportion of the housing subsidies) indirectly and directly through mortgage subsidies.
Data And Figures:
The report presents a huge amount of data and figures on various aspects of Hungarian housing. Essentially, this is a factual report and reflects the nature of the work as a commissioned empirical study. However, this format also raises a number of difficulties for the reader. First, the document lacks historical context. It is apparent to this reader that Hungary’s historical legacy remains very prominent in the contemporary story and, especially for newcomers to this country or to post communism in general, it was necessary to include more background information and perhaps rather more about the country as a whole.
Conclusion:
To conclude, on its own terms there is a lot of information in this report that specialist scholars can delve into, but a report about Hungary alone, especially one that is not conceptually grounded, is of limited value to the wider policy-making and academic housing studies communities. Nonetheless, the underlying issues hinted at in the report are fascinating and important to post-communist societies. Although it is difficult to tell from the report, at face value one has the strong sense that not so much has changed since the ‘old days’.
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