R. Rolnik, Urban Warfare: Housing Under the

So how did the citizens of the region’s countries, whose decades of active housing policy confirmed the belief that every person deserves a home, so quickly became convinced that this is a private matter, and that everyone should take care of it on their own now? Undoubtedly, the ubiquitous discourse promoting individualism and private property played an important role during the transition period. It penetrated all spheres: from media debates to pop culture images, from daily papers to illustrated magazines. Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak writes extensively about the transformation in perceptions and ideas about good life and comfortable living in her book Jesteśmy wreszcie we własnym domu (Home at last).20 The vision of a prosperous life “at home” was accompanied – rather like in the West – by various measures stigmatizing the system of subsidised social housing and its tenants. Even if the beneficiaries of social housing and other forms of social support that the state provided before 1989 were reluctant to enthusiastically embrace the reforms, it was more important for the success of the transformation that they found support among the elites. The latter in turn, willingly adopted and reproduced the individualistic discourse.

Importantly, in Central Europe, this discourse was not a complete novelty. The development of housing in socialist countries required large financial outlays, and the policy of low rents made it difficult to obtain adequate funds for the purpose, which is why in the 1970s some of the region’s countries began to cautiously encourage the construction of individual housing. This was not just about introducing the savings thus made by the more affluent households into the economic circulation. It was the sign that the changes taking place in the economic and social philosophy of socialist states were setting in. In Hungary, the symbol of those changes was the reform of 1968 known as the New Economic Mechanism, opening up the country to more pro-market forms of economic organization.21 Similar processes took place in Czechoslovakia and in Poland. Today, it is particularly important to try and capture the moment when the socialist ethos of collective action for a common, better future began to erode, and became gradually replaced by the individualistic discourse of aspiration and material consumption, family values and conservative models of social relations. It shows that laying foundations for the introduction of neoliberal solutions in the region was stretched over time. Even before experts from the World Bank formulated their recommendations for Central Europe, the Polish Round Table thematic group for housing policy called for “a move away from egalitarianism in the field of housing”,22 and its co-chairman Aleksander Paszkowski demanded that housing be moved “to the sphere of consumption, to a much greater extent than until now”.23 He saw a manifestation of “demanding attitude” and “confused thinking” in the belief that “everyone is entitled to housing”.24

Different faces of neoliberalism

While virtually all Central European countries have decided to privatize their housing stock, we will see many differences between them in terms of speed, scale, and the way they implemented their reforms. In Lithuania, 95 per cent of the housing stock had been privatized by 1995, while in other countries this process continued until the late 2000s.25 The history of the region shows that neoliberalism, from the start, was never a monolithic political and economic project. It was influenced by local political cultures, as a result of negotiations between different groups of stakeholders, and it took various forms. In Poland, the introduction of neoliberal reforms was particularly aggressive. The reformers were eager to employ the “shock therapy” discourse, and they left no room for illusion: wellbeing of the society in transition was not their primary concern. In Estonia, neo-liberal ideology was integrated as an element of national identity, and the privatization of housing was part of the process of symbolic breaking away from the past of the former Soviet Republic. The authorities tried to symbolically compensate for the inconveniences related to the course of reforms by strengthening the nationalist course.26 It was different still in Hungary, where the society expected the safety net of social security, and the largest political parties responded to this demand by introducing various mechanisms to mitigate the course of transition, including investments in the pension system, family policy, and unemployment benefits.27

From today’s perspective, it might seem that these differences are not of great importance, since all policies ultimately produced similar effects. However, it is worth recalling the words of Karl Polanyi from The Great Transformation: “the pace of change is often no less important than the change itself; and if we cannot influence the change itself, we can influence the pace at which it takes place.”28 It was in influencing the pace of changes that Polanyi saw a key tool for mitigating the social effects caused by the profound transformation of economic systems. For ordinary people it was a fundamental difference – whether the reforms in the 1990s were accompanied by protective measures, mitigating the effects of changes and improving the quality of everyday life, or whether they were offered symbolic ennoblement as the only form of compensation, leading to increased ethnic tensions and antagonizing various social groups. One of the categories fetishized by neoliberal discourse is economic growth. The example of Central Europe proves that this ideology is remarkably effective in generating growth in another field. David Harvey noted that the region experienced the greatest growth “in terms of inequality” following the introduction of free-market reforms.29 Privatization of housing played an important role in this process. Flats sold at a high discount, up to 90 per cent of their value, were priced arbitrarily, without taking into account factors that would affect the market price. Therefore:

One can speak of a ‘value gap’, i.e. the difference between the price paid by tenants for the redemption of flats and their rapidly changing market value. The capitalist logic of the real estate market, where location translates into market value, has strengthened the existing socio-economic divisions, not only inside cities, but also between them. [...] If, for example, two teachers, one from Wałbrzych and the other from Warsaw, earning more or less the same salaries at the beginning of the transformation, bought identical apartments for the same price in the same block of flats in 1991, this would not mean that both got the same deal.30

Socio-economic divisions had their origins, among other things, in the way housing was distributed during the socialist era. Although egalitarianism was an essential element of the socialist political project, various practices fossilized old social hierarchies or produced new ones. It was not only about the privileges resulting from political commitment and loyalty to the authorities, which sometimes might have been helpful for obtaining a flat in a prestigious neighbourhood, but about a systemic phenomenon observed in various countries of the region. As early as the 1960s, Hungarian city planners and sociologists noted a disturbing mechanism of unequal housing distribution among various social groups. Their research showed that:

Among those who were offered newly built apartments, the share of well-educated, wealthier families was disproportionately high. The new housing estates became home to the socialist middle class, while workers and other poorer families had to remain in the flats that had been much more modestly subsidized, or often they occupied inferior housing in the inner city or on the outskirts, where the infrastructure was significantly inferior.31

Similar results as the ones found in the work of Hungarian experts, and reported by Csaba Jelinek, were

20 D. Leśniak-Rychlak, Jesteśmy wreszcie we własnym domu, Kraków: Fundacja Instytut

Architektury, 2019. 21 Compare: C. Jelinek, op. cit., p. 51. 22 D. Jarosz, op. cit., p. 150. 23 Ibid., p. 149. 24 Ibid. 25 Compare: H.M. Broulíková, J. Montag, “Housing

Privatization in Transition Countries: Institutional Features and Outcomes”, Review of

Economic Perspectives 2020, vol. 20, no 1, pp. 65–69. 26 Compare: D. Bolee, “Post-Socialist Housing

Meets Transnational Finance: Foreign Banks,

Mortgage Lending, and the Privatization of

Welfare in Hungary and Estonia”, Review of

International Political Economy 2014, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 10–11 (pre-published). 27 Compare: ibid., pp. 9–10. 28 K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The

Political and Economic Origins of Our Time,

Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, p. 39. 29 D. Harvey, op. cit., pp. 17–18. 30 J. Kusiak, op. cit., pp. 109–110. 31 C. Jelinek, op. cit., pp. 64–65.