In 1932 the economic crisis reached its lowest point. Unemployment was rising and more and more people were left homeless. In order to house homeless families as quickly as possible, the municipal government decided to establish a suburban estate based on Assembly Ruling No. 870/1932. This institution, which had no precedent in Hungary, had already proved successful in several cases abroad. Among others, such settlements have been established in the 21st district of Vienna, in Mannheim, Germany, and in England (hence the name of the estate, i.e., ’Városszéli’ which literally means ’on the outskirts’ or ’suburban’).
As in the case of international examples, the basic idea behind this major social campaign of the municipality, in accordance with the principle of productive social policy (supporting economic self-sufficiency), was to build workers' houses for needy families, where the tenants could produce part of their food needs on the land belonging to the house with gardening.
The effectiveness and even the economy of this campaign was further enhanced by the fact that, as in Western Europe, the potential inhabitants of the settlement were also involved in the construction in the form of relief work. The same awareness can also be seen in the fact that the municipality, in order to combat unemployment, did not build emergency housing but opted to build a more expensive suburban settlement, which would create more jobs. Construction was carried out in four cycles between 1932 and 1939. With the exception of the last phase, the sum of one million pengő needed for the project was covered by a loan from the Private Employees' Insurance Institute (MABI) in January 1933, repayable over five years at an interest rate of 5%.
The site for the estate was designated at lot nr. 42528/4, a 118,500-square-metre plot of land enclosed by the outer Jászberényi Road and the Mór–Szolnok railway line, where the original plans called for the construction of 240 dwellings.
In November 1932, a public design competition was launched for the design of the site and the buildings, for which 185 designs were submitted. Of these, 40 were bought by the municipality, but they ended up using their own city planners to design the site, a move that was criticised a lot in the press of the time.
The establishment of the estate was hindered by the unfavourable location of the site from a drainage point of view, and the construction of a drainage channel was not even planned. Thus, the design of the roads had to take into account the most suitable drainage route for rainwater, but the engineers were constrained by the obligation to maintain the existing road and path as well. Most of the houses had an east-west orientation, with the twin houses being placed perpendicular to the outer Jászberényi Road in such a way that a concrete ring-lined well would provide water for construction and cultivation at the meeting point of four plots. The water issue continued to complicate the lives of the residents for a long time.
The construction works were divided among several contractors and subcontractors according to Decree No. 72.500/1932, so that each company could be commissioned to build a maximum of 5 to 10 houses. There was also work for the unemployed registered with the 9th (Public Welfare and Social Policy) Department, as the contractors were obliged to employ those who were designated by name and provided with a work permit. Thus, in 1933, nearly 500 workers were employed in the construction of the estate. Abuses were also discovered in this area, as, despite the mayor's decree, there were contractors who employed not the needy designated by the municipality for 32 pengő an hour, but girls from the countryside for 18 pengő.
Work on the first building phase began in the spring of 1933, when 54 semi-detached houses, a steward's apartment, offices, a commercial building and a school were built. The occupancy permits for 108 flats were issued on 27 May 1933, with the restriction that 4 of them had to be used for public purposes (grocery store, office) until the completion of the public buildings. The commercial building, built at a cost of 17,000 pengő, housed a grocery, a butcher's shop and a bakery, and in the last month of the year a three-classroom school designed by architect Sándor Bálint also started operating.
Each semi-detached house had 2 apartments with a kitchen and 2 rooms. Each apartment consisted of a 20 m2 room, a 10 m2 kitchen, a cellar, an attic and a porch. To this were attached various farm buildings (pigsty, goat shed, hen house) and a peat toilet. The kitchens were equipped with a single-burner stove and the rooms with slow-burners. The cost of building each dwelling was 8080 pengő.
The lease agreement signed with the tenants at the time of the lease specifically emphasised that the main purpose of the estate was to strengthen the tenants’ economic stance and livelihood.
The basic idea behind the estate was to provide the tenants not only with housing, but also with a 300 square metre plot of land to help them earn a living. The start-up of farming was supported by the distribution of free seedlings in the first year and of fruit trees thereafter. Cultivation of the land was made compulsory, and failure to do so resulted in the termination of the lease. Gardening was favoured by the sandy soil on which the estate was built. The designers placed the toilets and pens side by side over an easy-to-clean concrete-lined cesspit to facilitate manure management. In the early years, the gardens were used to grow around 20 types of vegetables, mainly potatoes, maize and beans, with the emphasis on providing food for both summer and winter. It is estimated that the gardens required 600-800 hours of labour per year to cultivate, with a maximum yield of 548 pengő in 1934. In the same year, the average value of the produce used up or sold by families was 284 pengő, which exceeded the annual rent.
Construction continued in the spring of 1934. The 34 semi-detached houses completed in the second construction phase took into account the lessons learned from the previous one. Thus, due to economic reasons and to their under-utilisation, the new houses did not have basements, access to the attic was provided by an external attic staircase, a closed lobby was designed instead of a porch, and smaller windows were preferred to make the rooms easier to furnish. Thanks to these innovations, the construction cost of a semi-detached house was reduced to 7,160 pengő. During this construction campaign, a doctor's office with an adjoining apartment were also built. The construction was financed by the 300,000 pengő left over from the 1 million pengő MABI loan, and the new settlers took possession of their homes in the autumn.
In the third phase of construction, in the autumn of 1935, another 14 semi-detached houses were handed over, financed by the 101,000 pengő still available from the MABI loan. In the same year, a culture house was completed with an investment of 20,000 pengő, which housed various courses and a reading room.
The further expansion of the estate was completed only three years later, in 1938, when, in the framework of the new housing construction campaign of the municipality, 25 apartments of similar design were handed over with the use of 100,000 pengő, based on Assembly Ruling No. 216/1938.
The estate's growth came to an end in 1939 with the construction of a further 11 dwellings, although there were still vacant plots in the area. As originally planned, a total of 240 flats were built in 120 semi-detached houses.
Life at the estate
Residents of the estate were selected from among Budapest residents with several children in need of public assistance, after a background check, where the total income of the family members was below the minimum subsistence level, a family member appeared to be able to cultivate the land belonging to the house on their own, and their moral and health condition made them suitable to move to the estate. In the first year, there were 250 applicants for around 100 places. In 1934 the settlement had just over 800 inhabitants, rising to over 1,000 in 1936 and 1,200 in 1939. The inhabitants of the settlement organised the Budapest 'Városszéli' Settlers' Association. The weekly rent for the flats was set at 5 pengő in 1933, which meant an annual cost of 260 pengő for the tenants. The rent due had to be paid on Sundays to the estate manager, who was an economic academy graduate and who was also responsible for checking that the terms of the tenancy agreement were being observed. The tenancy agreement was different not only in name but also in that the tenants had a greater role to play in the upkeep of the estate, i.e. in addition to tending the garden, they had to keep the road, pavement and drainage ditch in front of their house clean.
Utilities in the residential area left much to be desired. It had electricity but no sewerage and drinking water was supplied by 3 public wells. However, the sanitary conditions of the estate seemed to be adequate, as no major infections were reported.
One of the most pressing problems that needed to be addressed was the integration of the estate into public transport, as the vast majority of the population commuted to work in the inner city. In the early years, residents either used tram 28, the nearest stop of which was 3 km away, or the infrequent bus service. In 1934, in order to remedy this unfortunate situation, the municipality negotiated with the owner of the privately owned bus from Rákoshegy to increase the number of daily services from 6 to 10. The establishment of a separate railway station, located directly on the Szolnok line, seemed an obvious solution to the settlement's public transport problems. Negotiations with the Hungarian State Railway Company (MÁV) started in 1933, but were interrupted by financial problems. Finally, with the intervention of the Minister of Trade and Commerce, an agreement was reached in November 1936 for an investment of 30,000 pengő, but the first train did not stop at the estate until February 1938. The delay in construction was due to the fact that the negotiating parties could not agree on whether the State Railways would receive the station site for temporary or permanent use from the municipality.
The ’Városszéli’ estate was one of the most successful initiatives of the capital's housing policy at the time. The social care of the residents was provided by the Kozma Street Community Care and Education Centre, which in 1941 took the initiative to expand the culture house on the site in order to provide more space for family care. The organization's staff regularly visited the families of the estate. During their visits, they developed a “social picture”, on the basis of which they drew up a family-by-family care plan. The carers not only helped the residents with their daily chores, but also organised educational lectures and courses. ‘... [It is] not easy to provide adults with the right knowledge when they are tired, burdened with problems and often indifferent to further development. We have to create a nice framework, a community, so that they are happy to come and take in the carefully prepared and organised knowledge, almost unnoticed, served in a chocolate coating, so to say [...] the various circles (women’s, men’s, girls’, working young people’s) serve to educate them for community life, to create good neighbourly relations [...] and to establish direct contact between the estate’s residents.’ (The Culture House of the ‘Városszéli’ estate in the Service of Social Policy – Letter from the Head of the Kozma Street Community Care and Education Centre, 1 December 1941. HU BFL IV. 1409/c. 34395/1941-IX.)
Laura Umbrai (Translation from Hungarian: Barbara Szij)
(June 2024)