From the apartment for the worker to the apartment for Kovalsky: concepts and realities of housing in Poland in years 1918–1939 and 1944–1989

Abstract

In pre-war Poland housing for families of modest incomes in towns (chiefly workers) was not the object of particular interest of the state authorities. Direct state involvement in solving the deteriorating conditions of workers’ housing, cooperative building and employer initiatives in providing workers’ housing were of negligible significance. Two factors had a decisive influence on the transformations of this housing policy after World War II : varied war consequences (demographic and wide-scale destruction of the housing stock), and the political concepts of the new Polish authorities. The new housing policy was already formulated in 1944–45. In accordance with the new law, local authorities acquired the right to allocate housing to people whose work required living in towns. The ideological pressure to ensure better housing conditions, above all for industrial workers, caused restrictions on investment opportunities in the private housing sector initiative. It began to change after 1956. The Polish housing question was to be solved by state-subsidised cooperative building . Distinguishing workers as that social group which for ideological reasons deserved privileged access to new housing was ever more frequently replaced in the official language of the authorities with “non-class” distinctions (faceless Mr and Mrs Kovalski). In the end phase of the People’s Republic, workers’ housing conditions bore no comparison to those from before the war. But while the gaps separating them from those of other, higher social strata remained, the disproportions were reduced as compared to those of the prewar period.