The abolition of the fixed property circulation introduced during World War I (i.e. the fact that rents were previously determined by the 1917 wage level rather than by market conditions) brought about fundamental changes in the Budapest housing market. Decree No. 2830/1926 M. E. in principle restored free property circulation in the capital city, but the housing market was not fully liberalized until 1 November 1933, when Decree No. 1300/1933 M. E. came into force. Until that date, a distinction was made between tied and free housing under the government decrees in force regulating the distribution of housing. For people living in tied housing, the legislation provided protection against eviction and rent increases in excess of the legal limit. Thus, people living in such ‘protected’ housing could only be evicted in the event of persistent non-payment of rent. Following abolition of the aforementioned ruling, the rent of previously protected housing was also subject to free negotiation, i.e. the termination rules laid down in the rent regulations were also applicable to this housing.
From 1926 onwards, rents increased significantly, and the situation of the tenants worsened further as a result of the economic crisis of the early 1930s, with more and more people losing their jobs and thus their ability to pay rent. The arrears were followed by giving notice to the tenants, then lawsuits and, after a final court ruling, thousands of evictions. Those left without shelter were holed up in entryways with their furniture (a 1931 survey reported 300 such families) or moved to slums. In 1930, more than 12,000 tenancy notice cases were filed in Budapest, peaking in 1933 at the height of the economic crisis. Fewer than half of the cases ended in actual eviction; in the others, the solution was either an agreement between the parties or the tenant's voluntary relocation. At that time, the market rent for housing had not yet adjusted to the deterioration in the population's ability to pay. It was only then that rents began to fall (or, in the parlance of the time, 'rent erosion' began), which did little to improve the situation.
Evictions for not paying the rent were a serious problem in the capital city throughout the period. In 1936, 49% of tenants in private tenement houses had rent arrears, and one eighth of the tenants concerned owed more than a quarterly amount of their rent. Faced with this situation, the municipality decided to regularly check the eligibility of tenants in emergency housing for assistance and to seek government intervention to suspend evictions during the winter. Nevertheless, evictions in and around Budapest have not stopped.
‘...in the official circles of the town hall of Újpest, the view was that the Committee on Housing Shortages should review the earning potential of the residents of the "emergency shelters" [...] The solution to the housing shortage in Újpest is to evict evictees in order to accommodate new evictees [...] nearly 30 families received a notice to look for housing by 1 July [...] Naturally, these families were unable to comply with the notice, due to which [...] 14 families were evicted on Wednesday. They were mistakenly moved to the vacant lot next to the Chinoin factory [so they had to be moved] to the barracks next to the railway, still in the open air of course. [...] In the meantime, several more evicted families with their belongings have settled on the UMTE sports field near the cotton factory [...] it is planned to relocate the evictees to the garbage dump near the Phöbus sports field…’ (“Újpesti szociálpolitika az Úr 1935. évében”. [The social policy of Újpest in the 1935th year of Our Lord.] Népszava, 5 July 1935, 5.)
A similar story from 1936 was reported later in Népszabadság, based on a contemporary article in Tolnai Világlapja: the municipality settled homeless people into a private house at 88 Sibrik Miklós Street in exchange for the owner's tax arrears, and after the tax arrears were paid, the homeless people, who never paid rent after, were evicted. They first settled in the courtyard with their furniture and then, after being told to leave by the authorities, they left the property, as otherwise the authorities would have their children taken to a shelter or their furniture to a storage facility. At the time of the publication of the original article, they had already been living in a nearby field for 3 weeks on the 6-12 pengő eviction allowance that they received. (Vadász, Ferenc: “A Sibrik-telepi legenda”. [The legend of the Sibrik colony.] Népszabadság, 8 September 1960, 7.)
The following story illustrates the conditions in which the evictees were living: ‘7 Selmeci Street. Empty plot. In the middle of the plot there is a 40 cm high, 160 cm long, 50 cm wide wooden hut [There lives] a 27 year old mother with her two children, [...] two brothers [...] and a 72 year old man. [...] However, only the mother and her two small children fit in the hut. [...] they have been [living on the plot] for seven weeks, and this barn was built only last Sunday. [...] They were evicted from their old home. [...] They can't afford to pay the rent as a tenant, and they can't get a sublet with a child. [...] They don't get emergency housing and when a lady from the council was visiting them, and they asked for emergency housing, she repaid them with this answer, “What do you think, we give emergency housing to these kind of people?”’ (Szélpál, Árpád: “Kutyaólban és szabad ég alatt. A kilakoltatottak sorsa”. [In a doghouse and under the open sky. The fate of evictees.] Népszava, 15 Augustus 1930, 8.]
Another article in Népszava reported that a mother and her newborn baby were evicted from a shelter owned by Mrs Ernő Waldapfel at 35 Szegedi út. The eviction was justified, as it was ordered by a court decision due to rent arrears. (“Proletáranyák a szabad ég alatt”. [Proletarian mothers under the open sky.] Népszava, 31 August 1930, 10.)
As a result of the wave of evictions, slums have proliferated in Budapest. Most of these were spontaneously established on plots owned by the municipality, but private shanty towns were also created, and there were also plots such as the Hangya colony on the outskirts of Pesterzsébet, where the owner finally asked the authorities for help to clear the slum.
In addition to the evicted, homeless people from the countryside populated these settlements. In July 1931, the municipality conducted a census of shanty towns, which showed that 7,859 people lived in such conditions in 1,953 shacks. Areas were then designated where slums could continue to be maintained. These were then monitored by the authorities to prevent further growth in the number of shacks. They also banned the keeping of tenants and animals to improve living conditions.
In addition to the spontaneously established slums, there were also privately owned settlements set up for profit, the most notorious of which were the Globucsnik (on the Újpest quay), Veszeli, Indusztria and Suhajda colonies in Angyalföld.
The Suhajda colony was established long before the great wave of evictions, in the summer of 1924, when János Suhajda, an entrepreneur, converted the stables into shacks on a plot of land he owned near the Vígszínház (14 Pannónia Street) without a building permit. There was no sewerage, 20 toilets and 3 water taps supplied the 260-apartment site, which housed 1,000 people.
This disgrace to the capital was cleared up in 1926-1927, when the residents were transferred to the newly built emergency housing estate on Ceglédi Road, which was later extended in several stages.
Meanwhile, newer and newer housing estates were established, even in officially evacuated tenement houses, such as the one at 11 Váci Road, where 100 people lived despite the danger to their lives, and 8 tenant families crowded into the basement of 7 Szvetenay Street. In addition, spontaneous housing communities could also form in abandoned brickworks and other vacant lots, where homeless people found shelter in huts dug into the ground or in other wooden structures. Of course, it is impossible to reconstruct the numerous locations today, so without any claim to completeness, we will only list a few of the more well-known ones: the semi-underground houses in Budafok; the Bőhm brick factory in Óbuda; the semi-underground houses 3 Röppentyű Street; the pit houses in Kispest; Tarnai-puszta and Bihari Street.
In addition to these smaller settlements, there were also shanty towns consisting of hundreds of shacks. These included the colony on the banks of the Rákos stream, the already mentioned Hangya colony on Soroksári Road, the Jeruzsálem colony in Albertfalva, the Bíbic colony behind the Kelenföld railway station, or the Lóverseny tér colony in District 7, on the corner of Aréna and Thököly Roads, and perhaps the most notorious of all: the Kiserdő colony in Ferencváros. Of these, the municipality has devoted most of its attention to the eradication of the Lóverseny Square, Jeruzsálem and Kiserdő colonies.
The partial elimination of the Lóverseny Square colony, consisting of huts dug into the ground, took place in November 1928, when most of the people living there could be transferred to one of the 120 emergency housing units completed as a continuation of the Ceglédi Road settlement. The residents were delighted to learn that they could now use gas for cooking, although they had to pay 20 fillér per cubic meter of gas in prepay gas meter.
The Jeruzsálem settlement in Albertfalva was created on a landfill site on the embankment of the Danube, next to Hengermalom Street. The area was owned by the Municipal Public Works Council, and the "tenants" of the shacks paid the Council 20-40 pengő per month for renting them. According to contemporary accounts, the area had a foul stench, due to the garbage and the nearby sewer that drained into the Danube. At high tide, access was only possible by boat, so people built elevated platforms for their buildings. The landfill also provided a living for its inhabitants, as the nearby rubbish market was a place to sell the ‘treasures’ they found there. The site had no latrines, only stalls where buckets could be changed.
The Ferencváros Kiserdő (lit. ‘small forest’, also known as Ínség [‘scarcity’] or Kertész [‘gardener’] estate) was located between Vágóhíd Street, Lenkey Street, Hungária Boulevard and Mester Street. It got its name from the fact that it was once a forest, where the municipality set up family garden tenancies, and then, when evictions became widespread, the former tool sheds were converted into apartments. In 1931, like the Jeruzsálem colony, the 700 shacks here were taken under the control of the municipal government, and from 1934 the residents were officially allowed to use the flats for a weekly fee of 50 fillér.
From 1934 until the early 1940s, the estate was continuously dismantled. In the area thus freed up, the municipality, on the basis of Assembly Ruling No. 633/1937, established a small housing estate, in which only former residents of the Kiserdő were allowed to move in.
The large slums were usually established on the outskirts of the city or in the surrounding settlements. The majority of the ramshackle dwellings were huts dug into the ground, the elements of which were acquired from the surrounding rubbish yards. The pits were lined with pieces of tin under the ground, while rags and planks provided protection above ground. Most of the sites had been in existence since the second half of the 1920s, but their rapid development was triggered by the wave of evictions in the early 1930s. The municipality tried to eliminate them by building emergency housing (e.g. 120 flats for families in Lóverseny Square on Outer Jászberényi Road) or by providing rent assistance. The city's efforts proved futile in the short term, as in many cases even close monitoring did not prevent the creation of new shacks.
At the end of the Second World War, the municipality eliminated all of Budapest's slums, and the only remaining ones were the former state-run housing estates (the unrenovated parts of the Mária Valéria and Auguszta estates), where living conditions were no better than in the slums of the 1930s.
Laura Umbrai (Translation from Hungarian: Barbara Szij)
(August 2024)