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

The Civil Servants' Estate

The Civil Servants’ Estate

Between the unification of its three major parts in 1873 and the outbreak of World War I, the population of Budapest tripled. At that rate of growth, unprecedented in the whole of Europe, housing could hardly keep pace. The favourite form of capital investment in the construction industry was the multi-storey tenement block. However, this type did not provide every social class with accommodation appropriate to its needs and means. There was a great shortage of housing with rents outrunning wages, and tenants being left at the mercy of landlords, year after year we pay heavy rents to those who keep us as cotters and have the right to evict us from our wonted homes; we are driven from house to house and from street to street without ever owning a brick of the abodes we inhabit. How different it could all be if only we could call a place our own. if we knew that we would not be driven away to make room for another tenant, if no rude janitor had the right to shoo our children away from the courtyard? If only we had a tree or two whose shadow gave shelter to us after a tiring day’s toil! If only we had no more than a slip of a garden to grow a fruit tree in to harvest our own fruit in autumn!” The complaints and dreams of tenement house tenants were thus recorded by Mózes Gaál, headmaster of the secondary school on the civil servants’ housing development, who wrote the history of the estate in 1911, to mark its quarter centenary.

Lying next to Népliget (the People’s Park), the Civil Servants' Housing Estate

■ The Civil Servants' estate: a characteristic view (from József Cadi's book)

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