ABSTRACT
In the middle of the twentieth century, the housing situation in Hungary was worse than the European average as the level of comfort and furnishings found in Hungarian homes did not meet the European standards of the time. To best demonstrate this fact, statistics from 1939 reveal that out of nearly 270,000 apartments located in Budapest, only 50,000 had indoor plumbing, while 140,000 apartments lacked gas or electricity. A further ten thousand basement apartments were what more than twenty thousand people called “home.” According to data collected by the Hungarian Royal Office of Statistics in 1941, thirty percent of the inhabitants living in Szeged, one of Hungary’s larger cities, had to share one room with five or more people, a situation that affected approximately forty-one thousand people. These numbers alone testify to the low level of comfort and high density of people that characterized Hungary’s housing conditions throughout the 1930s and 1940s. As one of the most essential factors in determining everyday life, the issue of housing underwent noticeable changes in the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which the general trend demonstrated an increase not only in the number of apartments and houses, but also in the size of these structures. The comfort offered by these dwellings showed an overall improvement, a tendency which continued to grow after the fall of communism between 1989 and 1990; the post-communist era, however, also saw a sharp increase in the differences determining living conditions and the quality of housing available to those occupying a place at the top versus the bottom of society.
