At the end of the 1920s, the municipality of Budapest announced a campaign promising a thousand new emergency public housing units. Most of the housing completed between 1926 and 1932 consisted only of a kitchen and an adjacent small living area. Of all the facilities constructed in the campaign the one that attracted the most interest in the architectural press was the Bihari Street estate of 1932. What made this unique was that the contractors, using a prefabricated steel frame structure, completed the 123-apartment complex in just 40 days.
‘The whole house was built according to the American system. They put up the steel frame and only filled in the space between with artificial stone and modern bricks. [...] There are already 52 steel-framed houses like this in Budapest. It is not a cheap construction, but its great advantage is that the houses can be built in the shortest possible time’, wrote the 18 March 1932 issue of Magyarország.
But not everyone was happy with the construction.
The emergency dwellings, equipped with a wood-burning stove, electric lighting and gas connections, included separate cellar and drying compartments, an outside toilet, 5 laundry rooms and 2 mangle rooms. At the same time, ‘each floor – nine families – has only one water tap, and that in the same room as the toilets’, the press complained, among other things, about the way the building had been constructed. („Nem lehet beköltözni 10-én a ceglédi úti új szükséglakásokba…” ["It will not be possible to move into the new emergency flats on Cegléd Road on the 10th..." Magyarország, 10 March 1932, p. 5)
In the early 1930s, the status of emergency housing was also regulated by Decree No. 6000/1931 and Decree No. 4780/1932. It was stated that a dwelling was considered to be emergency housing if it was maintained by the municipality for the temporary accommodation of homeless persons. The Decrees classified the provision of emergency housing as public assistance, which could only be claimed by persons evicted in the territory of Budapest who were unable to rent accommodation due to their insufficient income.
Further construction projects
From the second half of the 1930s, the group of those in the city hall who supported the construction of new buildings became stronger again, and the council allocated 3 million pengő for the construction of 1,000 emergency housing units on the basis of the Assembly Ruling No. 173/1936.
Who were these flats intended for? In the emergency housing estates taken over from the state in 1937, 2,565 flats were condemned to demolition as soon as possible, thus the first task was to find homes for their inhabitants.
The main criteria for the construction of the new housing estates were their relative proximity to the city centre and the low cost of landscaping. The departments concerned carried out a joint inspection and decided to extend the existing site on Bihari Street, to convert the disused pig farm on Ceglédi Street into emergency housing and to build up the Gubacsi Street site.
Four-storey buildings with suspended corridors were planned for the Bihari and Gubacsi Road sites. In these, every 2 flats were provided with a vestibule, which included a common toilet and a communal sink. The size of the living space with a kitchen area was 26 m2. The apartments had private storage compartments in the basement and in the attic. In addition to a common drying room, there was a laundry room shared by 14 to 18 flats, and a bathroom with a bath or shower for each floor. The construction cost was 20 pengő per cubic meter and 3,000 pengő per apartment. The appropriateness of the suspended corridor was later questioned because of the invasion of privacy, as passers-by could walk along the windows and peek into the daily lives of the families, but there were also concerns about public health. The Gubacsi Road settlement was already colloquially known by contemporaries as the "Dzsumbuj" (‘the messes’, a name that stuck for a long period of time), while others referred to it as the Darányi houses.
The flats on Ceglédi Road were established by raising the roofs of the disused pig farm buildings and converting the administrative buildings and the swineherds’ houses to create flats with an average floor area of 22m2 at a cost of 1250 pengő each. A children's home was also established on this site in December 1939.
Based on the experience gained in the above-mentioned construction projects and on the basis of Assembly Ruling No. 197/1937, the municipality's stock of emergency housing was expanded in May 1938 with two buildings containing a total of 300 flats on a 2,561 square metre plot of land bordered by Zách and Hős Streets in District 10 at a cost of 900,000 pengő. These buildings were constructed to accommodate the residents of the state-run emergency housing estates that were being demolished at the time.
By these years, most of the remaining state-run estates were already in use as emergency housing. Their residents were generally living in much worse conditions than those at the municipal estates, as state housing estates were built immediately after the war, mostly converted from wooden military barracks.
Under Decrees No. 4780/1932 M.E. and 5400/1936 M.E., the Ministry of the Interior transferred the ownership of the state-run emergency housing estates all over the country to the respective municipality in whose territory they were located, obliging the municipalities to maintain them. Budapest formally took over the management of the state-owned estates on 1 July 1937, so from that date onwards the municipality alone had to bear the enormous burden of caring for the homeless. The number of emergency housing units under the management of the municipality rose from 2,959 to 6,880.
One of the former state housing estates, the Sashalom estate, did not become the property of the municipality of Budapest, although the authority responsible for it, Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County offered it for takeover in 1934. The site was used as a Russian prison camp during the First World War, and after the war homeless people were settled there. In 1922 it was taken over by the National Housing Construction Committee, then from 1929 it was semi-officially and from 1932 officially managed as an emergency housing estate by the Ministry of Public Welfare. In 1934, there were 3,050 people living at the estate. Only 5 of the 24 ground-floor houses without basements were built of stone. The dwellings had a floor area of 16, 10, 8 and 5 m2. The site had its own water supply, communal toilets with sewage disposal, collecting sewers and electricity. The capital city, despite the fact that the estate was adjacent to its administrative boundary, did not approve its annexation to Budapest, citing investment issues.
Let's take a short tour around the old state-run emergency estates, using newspaper articles from the period. ‘Barely paved alleyways run between rows of makeshift barracks made of rotten, smelly planks, where slops from the rooms, dirty rainwater and black mud flow freely. The room, actually a hovel, has a stuffy, almost palpably dirty air...’ (Szécsi, János: A pesti nyomorgyűrű [The ring of slums around Pest], In: Gondos, Ernő: A valóság vonzásában. [In the pull of reality.] Budapest, 1963, Vol. 1., 309. p. Originally published in Az Ország Útja, 1938/12., pp. 378–382.)
Árpád Szélpál's report on the Auguszta estate reveals that the walls are damp, the roof leaks, the floor has holes, and the residents report the defects in vain because the city does not care. ‘The culture house was parcelled out by the capital [...] they divided it into 17 compartments with rabitz walls, but they were not raised to the roof, but finished lower. [...] The doorhole was left empty. It was left to the residents to hang a rag or some kind of wooden fixture or board in place of the door. [...] Two or three of these emergency dwellings get natural light from the windows of the culture house. The others have no windows.’ (Szélpál, Árpád: "Auguszta-telep a főváros szégyenfoltja." [The Auguszta estate, the shame of the capital.] Népszava, 8 December 1938, p. 11.)
He found similar conditions at the Mária Valéria estate: ‘They don't even talk about the fact that the apartments have been parcelled up, that the apartments with a room and kitchen have been divided [...] the walls are damp, the ceilings are leaking, there is no water, the lighting is bad. [...] The windows are replaced by sheets of paper or pieces of woodboard.” The monthly rent for these and similar flats was 6 pengő, or it had to be paid for by labour. The author of the article bitterly remarked at the end of his report, “Well, the capital is the master [of these estates].’ (Szélpál, Árpád: "Mária Valéria-telep, a főváros szégyentelepe." [The Mária Valéria estate, the shameful spot of the municipality.] Népszava, 20 November 1938, p. 4.)
In 1939-1940, the demolition of the old state-run barrack blocks began as part of a new housing programme. The idea was that those families living in low-rent housing estates who could afford to pay the rent of the more expensive new housing estates would be relocated to the new ones and replaced by needy people with earning capacity. The construction campaign also included the creation of temporary housing estates, which were also designed to provide low-income families with many children with decent housing. Their monthly rent could not exceed 26 pengő, and priority was given to those living in emergency housing and to families whose total weekly income did not exceed 50 pengő (and 60 pengő for families of more than 5 members, respectively). Such temporary estates were established in the early 1940s, for example, at Aszódi and Füleki Streets (476 flats), at Maglódi Road and Sibrik Miklós Road (357 flats), and the Mária Valéria estate (388 flats). As a result of the construction work, by the beginning of the 1940s, the barrack estates built immediately after the First World War had disappeared from the city, with the exception of the Mária Valéria and Auguszta estates, which by then had become slums.
The Office of Emergency Housing, housed in a building on Alsóerdősor Street and under the control of the 9th Department, started its work in 1937. They were responsible for the reception of homeless people, the financial and social conditions of the residents, and the supervision of the stewards. The stewards were responsible for monitoring the health, economic, social and moral conditions of the families and alerted the Office if the public assistance became unjustified. The estate managers, responsible for the upkeep of the estate and the collection of the rent, were also under the direction of the steward.
Laure Umbrai (Translation from Hungarian: Barbara Szij)
(June 2024)