Témák

By the 1910s, the cholera barracks built by the municipality of Budapest in the last decades of the 19th century were completely ruined and in no way met the needs of the time. The municipal government therefore planned to build 900 emergency housing units, evenly distributed among the districts, in parallel with the demolition of the old wooden barracks, as part of its housing programme launched in 1909. However, not many of these plans were realized. A complex of 105 apartments was built on the Újpest quay, but it was later declared a small flat housing estate, which means that these apartments were not included in the housing scheme for evictees. By 1912, a large-scale emergency housing estate was completed at 15 Vágóhíd Street, and a competition was launched to replace the emergency housing on Egressy Street. Meanwhile, preparations also started on the Babér Street estate, but nothing more was done in the housing construction campaign (1909–1913) under the mayorship of István Bárczy.

Affordable housing for the majority of the lower classes and what was then known as the rent usury, provoked strong reactions from the public at the end of the first decade of the 1900s. This was a period of housing riots, rent strikes, squatting and, in extreme cases, house demolitions in Budapest, which finally spurred the idea of care and the increasingly active municipal economic and social policy of the municipal authorities to action. These housing movements provided the impetus for a public housing programme on a scale that was completely unprecedented for the period, with the government contributing to the construction of 3,657 flats at the Wekerle estate, in addition to the investment of the municipality of Budapest that resulted in almost 6,000 flats.

Ignác Wechselmann passed away on February 17, 1903. A detailed inventory of his estate was made shortly afterward, on April 21 and April 24. The net estate amounted to a substantial sum of 10,638,830 crowns. On the first day of the probate inventory, a 145-item inventory of the furniture was made in the apartment at 72 Váci Road (now Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Road). Not only were the individual pieces of furniture listed, but the rooms they were in were also named. Thus, the inventory can be used as a kind of guidebook, enabling a walkthrough of Wechselmann's home.

Architect Károly Hegedős (1895-1972) created a nine-volume memoir series, each volume spanning 700–900 pages, covering his life from childhood up to the time of writing in the 1950s. These volumes are preserved in the Archives of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The sixth volume, titled Új honfoglalás (‘New Conquest’) and written in 1952, details the author’s life from the autumn of 1933 to the summer of 1939, focusing primarily on his housing experiences. This includes the extensive challenges he faced finding rooms and apartments, along with the detailed planning and furnishing of his living spaces. During this period, Hegedős, who lived alone until 1938, struggled with securing stable housing of acceptable quality while also establishing a stable existence. After two decades of renting rooms, he was cautious of high rent and housing costs but longed for an independent apartment – a place to call his own. Ultimately, he found a solution to his housing problems in a popular ‘garzonház’ (studio apartment building) of the era, where he rented a small apartment for only slightly more than what he had paid for his previous rented rooms.

The first two studio apartment blocks in Budapest were built almost simultaneously in mid-1926. On the Buda side, in Lágymányos, in Zenta Street near the Technical University, the Új Otthon Társasházszövetkezet (‘New Home Condominium Cooperative’) was the developer, and in Pest, at the junction of Üllői Road and József Boulevard, in Kisfaludy Street, the investor was Gyula Perl and his wife. In addition to the state loan and tax relief, the construction of the apartment building complex on the plot bounded by Horthy Miklós Road (today: Bartók Béla Road) – Zenta Street – Budafoki Road (the Zenta Street apartment building was also located within this complex) was also helped by a new legal possibility, which had just been opened in 1924: the purchase of one's own home. Act XII of 1924, which introduced the institution of separately registered house parts and condominiums, also involved house owners, builders and future homeowners with smaller capital in the construction of housing. The ‘New Home’ building cooperative also wanted to finance the construction of the studio apartment complex on the large plot of land in Lágymányos, bounded by Horthy Miklós Road – Zenta Street – Budafoki Road, partly from the contributions of future owners.

Renowned author Zsigmond Móricz entered the literary world primarily as a writer focused on peasant life, serving as a literary sociographer of peasant society. Although he created many works centered on village life and rural settings, he also left behind numerous writings with a Budapest focus, though these received little attention. In the last ten to fifteen years of his life, Móricz sought ‘to capture Budapest’. One of the spatial-literary frameworks for this authorial mission became the tenement. In his Budapest novel, ‘The Wife Intervenes’ (Az asszony beleszól), Móricz draws on his experiences from his youth with housing, telling the story of Budapest's society in the 1930s within the backdrop of a double-courtyard tenement in Ferencváros, focusing on the intelligentsia teetering on the edge of middle-class status and the fear of downward mobility. The entire narrative of The Wife Intervenes unfolds within the outer and inner spaces of a double-courtyard tenement complex in Ferencváros. Móricz provides an almost complete overview of the apartments on the building’s first floor and the society of its residents. The novel is set in a small apartment in the rear courtyard, where Móricz and his first wife, Janka Holics, lived during the early years of their marriage, and in the surrounding apartment community. The setting is so authentic that the apartments and parts of the building described in the story match precisely with the layout and site plan documentation of the building at 91 Üllői Road, where the couple lived.

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.

At the beginning of their expansion in Budapest, between 1907 and 1914, condominiums were built in various parts of the city. They were spread roughly equally between the Buda and Pest sides, and there were few parts of the city where they did not appear. They appeared in the Lágymányos, Németvölgy and Víziváros neighborhoods, and in Pest in the Inner City, today's Újlipótváros, as well as Terézváros, Erzsébetváros and Józsefváros, and even in Kőbánya. The projects that only reached the planning stage were even more dispersed, with ideas for the area behind Margit Boulevard, the lower areas of Naphegy, as well as Zugló and Ferencváros. Among the developers' targets, the Castle District, Újlak and Óbuda, as well as Lipótváros, were completely left out. Despite their spatial dispersion, their spread nevertheless showed a distinctive pattern: there were pockets of densification where more than one or two of them appeared or were planned. This pattern showed that the construction of one condominium led to the organization of others in its neighborhood. Such clustering could be observed in blocks of land in Lágymányos, but also on the Pest side, in the vicinity of the Városliget (City Park): in a block of land in Ilka Street, the idea of five condominiums took shape around 1909-1910.

The recently unified Hungarian capital of the end of the 19th century, like the North American and Western European cities, attracted a new workforce, including a large number of single people (both workers and middle class). A more accurate picture of middle-class single men living alone for long periods of time within the rapidly growing population can be obtained by analyzing more general historical statistics, as well as information from apartment advertisements and apartment floor plans. At that time, single women in the capital who were visible/perceptible in the statistics could not yet be considered as independent tenants (or apartment seekers). For them, studio apartments (in Hungarian, their name was ‘garçon apartments’, referring to the single men that usually occupied them) were a specifically forbidden element of the city, a threat to their reputation, and it was only in the years between the two world wars that renting such apartments became socially acceptable for them for the first time.

The new types of facades created through reform developments aimed at improving apartment quality, expanded and reinterpreted the traditional dual classification of street- and courtyard-facing apartments in the context of closed row housing with enclosed courtyards. Without changing the basic layout and conceptual thinking, various types of connecting courtyards transformed the meanings of street and courtyard facades, and garden facades, previously associated with free-standing buildings, began to emerge. This development affected the classification of rooms and apartments based on their street and courtyard orientation and introduced a new category for garden-facing rooms.

Until the early 1930s, a one-room flat was synonymous with a worker's flat, and this stigma was also carried by the small flats in the new tenements. In 1928, the year of its launch, in the magazine Tér és Forma (‘Space and Form’), Jenő Padányi Gulyás spoke of modern small flats as a type of housing that was to be built for workers as a company benefit and to have an educational effect. Five years later, the same journal published the plans of György Oblath and Gábor Preisich, in which the design duo replaced the old apartments of an Erzsébetváros block with a healthier, modern apartment block with ‘adequate daylight’. They also rejected the one-room flat as ‘inappropriate’, and only included a few studio flats designed exclusively for singles. Almost half of the 500 flats on the proposed site at the time were one-bedroom plus kitchen flats, which were found to be best replaced by two-bedroom flats. In 1936, Lajos Kozma came to the defense of the ‘minimalist’ middle-class flats. In his view, smaller living space ‘does not mean poverty or a disadvantage’, but rather ‘a planned idea’ for the benefit of the tenant.

As the concept of homeownership emerged on the horizon of housing in Budapest, a new alternative to renting began to take shape in terms of accessing housing. The promotion of condominium construction was built on emphasizing the advantages of homeownership over the disadvantages of renting. Proponents of the new idea saw the main virtue of homeownership compared to renting in the liberation from paying rent and the threat of eviction. They contrasted the vulnerability of constant rent increases and the threat of eviction with homeownership as an inheritable asset, which not only frees one from the burden of paying rent but also constitutes personal property, providing secure shelter under all circumstances, even for heirs in the event of death.
The construction of freehold flats that began in Budapest in 1907 had barely made the presence of this new form of housing noticeable in the city by 1910, since there were only six condominiums at that time. Housing conditions in the inner areas were defined by the rental housing system. This system was flexible enough to adapt to changes in family and household structures that came with life cycles: the transformations in a household due to aging or family events could be quickly accommodated by moving between rental apartments. The anomalies that fundamentally disrupted the housing mobility processes were brought about by the fixed property circulation introduced during World War I and the 1920s, that is, the system of government intervention in the housing market. On the other hand, the transformation of family composition within the framework of this rental housing system was also associated with extreme vulnerability, affecting the middle class as well. Such a circumstance could arise from the death of the family’s head, i.e. the husband, who was most often the sole breadwinner in a middle-class family, leading to the complete existential vulnerability of the housewife. This was the situation faced by the Bugsch family, where the death of Dr. Gusztáv Bugsch, a forty-four-year-old dentist, in May 1910 after a long illness, resulted in the emotional and existential collapse of the family with young children. The family tragedy was further compounded by a move, as the family with three children had rented a new, larger apartment in the autumn of 1909, which not only lost its function after the father's death but also became unsustainable.