ABSTRACT
The state interventions during socialism created a segment of mass public (semipublic) rental housing, where rents and utility prices were by regulation kept at extremely low levels. Price regulations made it possible to suppress the wages of the economically active population and thus temporarily maintain the competitiveness of the socialist economies. Tenants who were allotted flats by the state obtained unlimited occupancy rights in the form of a so-called ‘deed’ to the flat—later called quasi-homeownership (Lux 2009; Hegedüs and Tosics 1998).
