Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

Government and municipal housing: the "Wekerle"

utca; some of these long, parallel buildings are still in evidence along Kőbányai út. Of the tenement blocks, Béla Málnai and Gyula Haász’s small-flat estates (at 32-34 Hungária körút) and Béla Rerrich’s apartment house, the latter standing in a large garden (at 140-142 Dózsa György út), deserve special mention. What made the former a novelty was the spacious, U-shaped arrangement of three simple buildings, while the employment of a front garden is the innovative feature of the latter. A valuable quality of both is the generous architecture well- suited to welfare housing.

Another large-scale welfare housing project of the period was the construction, by the government, of the Wekerle Estate in Kispest. The city's initiative was taken over by Minister of Finance and Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle, and as decreed in Act XXIX of 1908, the government undertook to build 8-10,000 workers' flats in Budapest and environs. Of the two designated areas in Kispest and Kőbánya, it was only in the former that construction work was actually carried out, as the area was not owned by the city and was therefore unaffected by the property-speculation endemic to the capital, where real-estate prices were three times higher. The strict regulations in force in the city did not apply either, so construction expenses were that much lower, too. The nearly four thousand flats of the Wekerle Estate raised in 1909-26 were meant mainly for the employees of state-owned companies. The majority of the one-to-three■ Corner houie on a diagonal thoroughfare of the Wekerle Homing Citate

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