Social, healthcare and cultural facilities at the municipal estates
In the case of the small flats (both in tenement houses and at the estates) built under Mayor István Bárczy's building campaign (1909–1913), the municipal authorities had to ensure that the sanitary needs were met, and the high number of children also meant that the city had to provide school and kindergarten capacity.
During these years, Budapest not only led the way in small housing construction, but was also one of the European leaders in overcrowding and tuberculosis. Solving public health problems had been a major mission of the municipal administration since the emergence of cholera in the 19th century. For this reason, efforts were made to provide a sufficient number of laundry rooms for each estate in proportion to the number of dwellings, since without them, washing and drying clothes would have been done in the apartments, which in itself posed a serious health risk to the people living there. Laundry rooms were therefore either attached to the houses or located in separate 'laundry pavilions', with the same facilities for mangling.
At the Ernő Street estate, for example, 16 laundry rooms, 2 mangle rooms and 2 bathrooms were built to serve a total of 347 families from the three nearby settlements (Mihálkovits, Telepy and Haller Street), who could use the facilities on a rotating basis.
Compared to the previous municipal (emergency housing) construction, the provision of bathrooms at each estate was a milestone. Previously, in their absence, the population used the wells and public baths, but the Bárczy construction projects have now provided five estates with their own bathing pavilions. These included baths, showers, footbaths and doctors' offices, while other facilities (a library, a caretaker's office, a counselling service and even a legal aid office) were also available. For example, the public welfare building on Százados Road had 9 baths and a shower room, as well as a cloakroom and changing room. According to the specifications, hot water was supplied by water heating boilers with a capacity of 50 litres of water at 40 degrees per minute.
According to the bathing regulations of the Vágóhíd Road emergency housing estate (BFL IV. 1407/b.3337/1913-XIV.), the bath was available between 6am and 9pm (5pm on Sundays) after prior appointment, and the bath supervisor could be contacted up to one week in advance to book the exact time. Contagious illness sufferers were not allowed to use the baths, nor were their relatives, and those who had previously been caught being indecent were also not allowed to use the service. After bathing, the tub had to be washed with alkaline water and then rinsed with a dry cloth. Anyone who did not want to do this themselves could pay a cleaning fee of 30 fillér for the job, including cleaning the stove, to the bath supervisor, who would otherwise check the tidiness when the key was returned. Use was free of charge for the dwellers of the Vágóhíd Road estate, but the residents had to provide the fuel to heat the water.
At the Palotai Road estate, where people in slightly better financial conditions than those living in the emergency housing were residing, a bath cost 40 fillér. This allowed not only one adult but also three children under 12 to bathe in the 40 minutes available, while a 20-minute shower cost only 10 fillér. Bathers could also rent towels and bath towels for 6 and 16 fillér respectively. One could also get soap for 2 fillér. A separate welfare building was erected on this large complex next to the public baths.
At the end of the 1910s, the Palotai Road settlement and the nearby Babér Street emergency housing estate, which housed a total of 4,000 people, had a daily turnover of 57 at the bath house. Later, with the establishment of the state-funded estate on Madarász Street, the question of expanding the public baths arose, thus, six more baths were built, as the observation was that showers were less popular as a form of personal hygiene.
When the estates were established, they also had to be provided with public utilities. Most were equipped with gas lighting, but there were also examples of kerosene lighting. Electricity was only introduced in the 1920s. Originally, the estates at Váci Road, Tattersall, Aréna Road and Ciprus Street were equipped with kerosene lighting.
As well as providing small flats, the cultural needs of the residents also had to be met. One of the most urgent tasks was to establish schools and kindergartens. It was at this point that the campaign was linked to the school-building strand of the investment programme of Mayor Bárczy. Under this programme, permanent schools (still in operation today) were set up, mainly in areas where small apartment tenement blocks were built alongside the estates to cater for the increased population in the area. These included, but are not limited to, the schools in Szörény Street, Vág Street, Mester Street, Miklós Square, Lehel Road and Váci Road.
However, the estates were often populated sooner than the planned school buildings nearby were completed, so education often started in temporary barrack schools, which were later used for other purposes (e.g. as children's homes). Libraries were also established on several sites, of which the one on Százados Road, for example, was so busy that in 1940 the mayor's office, stressing its important cultural mission, called for it to be combined with the two-room flat next door.
Management of small flats
The management of the municipality's small flats was initially carried out by the Presidential Department of the Council, and from 1912 by the 14th (Social Policy and Public Education) Department, which was established to manage social tasks unanimously, while further construction work, including the preparation of plans, was the responsibility of the 13th (Construction) Department. As the housing situation in Budapest changed, it was up to the 14th Department to propose the location and type of new construction, and the rents for the housing already completed. To manage the sites, the 14th Department employed stewards, estate managers and other support staff.
The residents first approached the janitor or the manager with their various problems. They were under the control of the steward and the competent (Presidential, and then the 14th) Department, and for their services they received an allowance in kind (one or two-room flats, depending on the size of their family), as well as a janitor's allowance (set by decree at 2% of the rent) and garbage fees. Estate managers who looked after fewer than 50 flats received only the use of a flat as a salary in kind, while those who looked after 51-100 flats received 3% of the annual rent, from which the council subtracted the rent of their one-room flat, and those who looked after more than 101 flats received 3.5%, minus their own rent.
The managers could oversee up to 150 homes. They monitored compliance with the housing rules, investigated undeclared tenants or pets and informed the council of vacancies. They also settled new tenants and collected the rent. They reported any breakdowns to the steward, and directed support staff such as the vice janitors in charge of cleaning. All tenants were obliged to use the services of the vice janitors, who charged a fee of 1 crown for those renting a two-room flat and 80 fillér for those living in a one-room flat.
The estate managers were monitored by stewards, who also represented the interests of the residents to the council. The stewards were also responsible for the official renting of the flats, keeping an account of the rent received and arrears and paying these sums into the Central Treasury, according to the 1912 house rules, but they were also responsible for solving problems that went beyond the powers of the estate managers.
The stewards requested repairs, managed home repairs done by dwellers, and informed the council about sanitary deficiencies and public order offenses on the sites. The stewards managed the inventory of facilities and liaised with the Accounting Board, and had to deal with unreported sub-tenancy cases. On their advice, the council authorized exchanges of tenants, but there are also examples of someone being rented a flat on the estate on their recommendation. As far as possible, each estate was under the 'care' of a different official, who was in any case employed by the municipality. They were paid 1% of the annual wage value of the flats entrusted to them, which could be around 400-1000 crowns. However, if the tenants had a problem with the steward, they had to go to the Central Housing Administration.
Stewards included accounting councilors, draftsmen, notaries and even a retired chief notary.
The rent
The results of the housing scheme have been of great interest to professionals, so a wide-ranging survey of tenants was carried out both to ensure its continuation and to convince political circles and the public. Imre Ferenczi, of the Social Policy Department, organized the information gathered. In particular, the office had to verify two things about the construction works. The first was the principle of economy, to prove that the taxpayers of Budapest would not be harmed by the project, i.e. that the municipality was not handing out charity. The other was to meet a social objective and to set an example for developers, i.e. to ensure that as many poor families as possible could live in the municipality's housing in the best possible conditions, at the lowest possible (but still market) rent.
Ferenczi and his colleagues compared the rents of the new apartments with those of other apartments in the same category in the neighborhood. The results showed that one-bedroom apartments in the new municipal apartment buildings were 35% cheaper than similar flats in the same neighborhood, while two-bedrooms were 20% cheaper, three-bedrooms 10% cheaper and four-bedrooms 5% cheaper, respectively. The statistics were even more telling for small apartment complexes. Here, rents for public housing were barely more than half (for one-bedroom flats) or two-thirds (for two-bedroom flats) of those for similar quality housing in private houses.
Of course, this is only an average figure, but looking at the data in detail it becomes clear that the buildings in Buda were more expensive, so the rents charged by the capital were higher than those in the surrounding area, which is explained by the fact that the rents of the modern multi-storey apartment blocks built at that time had to be compared with the rents of the flats rented in the ground floor houses in the surrounding area. (However, the Ferenczi statistics are not entirely reliable either, as they use the same rent data for private tenements as for the comparison both with tenements and housing estates built by the capital.)
The municipality has established three main groups of rents when setting the wages at housing estates. The cheapest flats per square meter were the 34 m2 flats for 230 crowns, where the relatively low construction costs were combined with a low cost of land. This was followed by the estates with multi-storey blocks built in the last cycle of the campaign, where people paid 180 crowns for apartments of 25 m2, since the investment costs were high and the land value low. The worst off were those who paid 200 crowns for 24 m2 apartments, whose relatively high rents were due to the expensive plots, but who at least benefited from the central location and good transport connections. In the early years, the municipality still made a small profit from its social housing projects, although this was mainly achieved by the fact that the plots of land they had previously leased for agricultural purposes, now built on, ‘produced’ much larger sums.
The maximum rent for housing built by municipalities was set by the Tax Exemption Act, which set the maximum rent that could be collected per house, so the city could still give a higher discount to tenants of smaller flats in apartment blocks at the "expense" of tenants of multi-roomed flats. This leeway was less given in the case of estates with a majority of flats of the same quality.
If a tenant had not paid rent for a long period of time and the municipality was unable to collect it through other channels, evictions were also carried out in the case of municipal housing. The reason for the arrears was usually the poverty of the tenants or the large number of children. The data on moves show that only 7% of the moves were due to eviction by the authorities, of which only 1.5% were due to rent arrears. The situation was less favorable at the housing estates than in small apartment blocks, with 11% of evictions due to rent arrears. Voluntary move-outs in the first year, including apartment exchanges, accounted for 12% of all rented accommodation. At first glance, this figure may seem high, but it was in line with the trend of the time, when a significant percentage of the population (and especially of tenants of cheaper housing) decided to move from one neighborhood to another in an attempt to reduce their costs based on their quarterly income.
Principles of renting and tenants
The social objective was a primary consideration in the renting process, and thus the group of people who were eligible for housing was defined. In particular, priority was given to families with many children, who, precisely because of the number of children they had, found it more difficult to find accommodation elsewhere. The municpality examined the financial situation of the applicants and thus their ability to pay the rent. Preference was given to employees of the municipality. In doing so, the municipality aimed to develop long-term tenancies while providing a helping hand to a relatively reliable wage-paying stratum, potentially drifting towards the margins of society, in order to create a more secure existence.
At the same time, in line with the principles of the decades-long fight against overcrowding, they also sought to promote the public health objective, which they invoked to restrict the housing of sub-tenants and especially bed tenants at the estates, and to house families with several children in two-room flats. Ferenczi's data collection shows that a total of 88 people at the estates were subletting (72% in a one-room plus kitchen apartment), generating two-thirds of their rent. Sub-tenancy was much higher in private rented housing and later, as the economic situation worsened, this favorable rate also deteriorated in municipal housing.
So at this point, the principle of care for the needy and the principle of return on investment came into conflict, since families with many children were usually the poorest, so they could not be expected to rent more expensive, larger apartments. The city administration had prepared for this contradiction by designing one-room plus kitchen apartments with a relatively large floor area and ceiling height, improving the ratio of cubic meters per person.
If someone wanted to rent a flat in such a municipal house, they had to submit an application stating where and what kind of accommodation they would need, how much they had paid in their previous tenancy, whether they had a subtenant or a bed-renter, and whether they had a contagious disease. You also had to explain why you wanted to live in that particular house. If your application was accepted, you could sign a tenancy agreement. In this case, the new tenant had to pay a deposit of the full weekly rent in the case of a weekly tenancy, or 20% of the rent in the case of a monthly or quarterly tenancy.
An information booklet was also given to the residents to help them use the apartments more efficiently. In it, the municipality published general principles of hygiene that could be used to good effect not only by the residents themselves, but also by the residents of private houses. Budapest therefore printed 25,000 copies and distributed them (free of charge) among tenants, including those living in private tenement houses.
When drawing up the balance sheet of the renting campaign, the municipality made a detailed assessment of the situation of the tenants, the composition of the families, their occupation, etc. 44 % of the residents were children under 14 years of age, 75 % of the heads of household were unskilled labourers. 39 % worked in industry and the remainder were public servants (2:1 between the municipality and the state, the latter mainly as police officers or postmen), since the municipality gave preference to public servants when allocating tenants.
Efforts to improve quality of life
The monitoring of the public health situation at the estates has been a major focus of the municipality. Control was primarily the responsibility of the estate manager, and most evictions were due to inappropriate use of the dwellings.
Waste disposal was a regular problem at the estates. During this period, waste collection was handled by the municipality. Refuse bins were placed at different points at the estates depending on the number of residents, but there were also instances of residents placing rubbish on the refuse trucks that were used to circulate around the estate. In this case, the waste had to be kept inside the dwelling until the twice-weekly collection of the waste.
The residents of the Újpest quay area were fed up with this and simply threw their rubbish into the street. The residents’ dissatisfaction was presumably due to the fact that the municipality of Budapest was collecting rubbish elsewhere on a daily basis.
There was an estate where the butcher was a nuisance, whose operations 'turned the area into a swamp of flies and stench in the warmer seasons'. Fear of cholera also prompted the authorities to intervene, and they regulated the butchers' operations on the premises, banning both smoking and roasting meat.
Both from a social and a sanitary point of view, the landscaped gardens of the estates played an important role, with flower competitions being organized to encourage residents to spruce up their small gardens. The municipality itself also placed great emphasis on environmental care. A specific landscaping plan was drawn up for each estate and private companies were contracted to provide long-term maintenance. Thanks to all these public health measures, the mortality rate among the inhabitants of the estates was also better than the average for Budapest, at 15.9 per-mille compared to 18.5 per-mille for the municipality's housing estates and 5.2 per-mille for municipal tenement blocks.
Laura Umbrai (Translation from Hungarian: Barbara Szij)
(June 2024)