Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
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fifteen to twenty people. It is not difficult to imagine that where demand is so keen a resourceful but often ruthless business mind will not remain inactive. The practice of demanding excessive rents, with all the resulting misery, has also emerged here. Where a considerable proportion of factory, industrial and other workers have to face such housing conditions, the welfare of the family, public health, moral and physical wellbeing, productive national manpower, in short, the basic institutions of the state, the vital interests of the living and future generations are all endangered. Aware of all these facts, the government is seriously concerned to find a solution to the really alarming housing conditions of the capital, with a double purpose in mind; on the one hand, to provide satisfactory and in so far as is possible, cheap homes, and, wherever practicable, to reduce high rents on the other. A satisfactory home, suiting the financial position of the individual, is the first foundation of contentment. It is an important health factor, and fosters and promotes good morals; it enhances the pleasure of work, increases the working capacity, and consolidates the ties of affection for land and country; in short, it creates a valuable physical and emotional response which, in the last resort, is a factor which is also important for our economic and national invigoration. But to build such homes in the central area of the capital is to be faced with insurmountable difficulties; the high price of land in the capital and the high cost of building, would in fact raise the cost of the necessary investment to the point where our workers and our other social classes struggling with the anxieties of a limited income could not afford, from their present earnings, to pay even the relatively moderate rents that might be asked after this cost. It is beyond question, moreover, that the health and the moral and economic interests of the workers would be better served by homes away from the polluted atmosphere of the centre, as far as possible free from the morally harmful overcrowding of the tenement system, with opportunities for the cultivation of small gardens and keeping a few useful domestic animals. The government is consequently convinced that if the question of cheap travel to and from the capital could be satisfactorily answered, as the provision of a modern necessity, the housing conditions of the workers could be greatly improved, by settling most of them on the outskirts of the city and by building there, at least, for the most part small working-class houses of the villa type. This solution would also be advantageous in that it would create a natural basis for the integration of the neighbouring communities into the capital in the future, and a greater supply of housing as large numbers of workers’ homes in Budapest become vacant might bring down the excessively high rents in the capital. ... The construction of such homes for workers would undoubtedly only produce the anticipated results if resettlement is carried out on a large scale, coupled with the prompt and cheap purchase of larger areas of land, in the neighbouring districts, with building on a mass scale and if considerable capital is available for it ... Magyar Törvénytár, 1908 [Collection of the Acts of Hungarian Parliament], pp. 774-775. 98
