This chapter follows the main threads of housing-related tensions and respective movements across the three main phases of Hungary’s postsocialist transformation described in Chap. 3: the change of regime and transition in the 1990s, the debt-driven growth of the 2000s, and the post-2010 period of national conservative supermajority governance. The political expressions of these tensions vary across periods and field positions—some being characterized more by silent coping, others by continuous organization or intermittent eruptions of demonstrations. However, the tensions themselves are relatively stable across time, located structurally either at the bottom of the housing hierarchy, where the more extreme forms of housing poverty produced by commodification are evident, or in low- to middle-income groups, for whom housing access through homeownership (the main route to housing access in a super-homeownership system) remains limited, and who even as owners often struggle to pay maintenance costs.

For housing poverty, the tensions in this chapter are mainly manifested in struggles with homelessness, a lack of social housing, and two aspects of the geographic peripheralization of low-income groups: evictions related to urban regeneration and peri-urban informal dwellings. For low- to middle-income groups, the chapter traces two main symptoms of limited housing access: the problem of debt and the forex debtors’ movement after 2008 and initiatives concerning cooperative and rental dwellings (such as the Tenants’ Association, social housing agencies, and cohabitation).

The 1990s: Hierarchical Privatization, the Peripheralization of Poverty, and the Institutionalization of Homeless Assistance

As indicated in Chap. 3, the privatization of state housing was key to shaping the unequal structures of the postsocialist housing system in several ways. First, in addition to existing hierarchies of state housing distribution, privatization arose in a hierarchical manner, providing more “privatization gifts” to more affluent households. Second, in inner-city tenant houses dilapidated due to reduced maintenance budgets of state maintenance companies, new owners inherited maintenance tasks but seldom had the financial means to tackle them. The privatization of social housing by local governments to cover up budget deficits significantly reduced the number of social rentals. Meanwhile, the liberalization of utility prices, coinciding with a wave of unemployment and underemployment during the transition crisis, made monthly costs unaffordable for many households. The closure of workers’ hostels and other forms of state institutional housing immediately made homelessness starkly visible within the city. The following section outlines the typical tensions and conflicts created by that situation, from the least visible to the explicitly political.

The Silent Peripheralization of Housing Poverty

Faced with the above mentioned processes, many newly unemployed industrial workers, commuters, and low-income large families were pushed to move toward areas with lower housing costs—cheaper, run-down inner-city districts, urban peripheries, or rural areas (Illés, 2006: 175). Local governments’ attempts at market-based urban regeneration programs in inner-city districts—in a context where spontaneous market processes produced insufficient investment in poor areas, and state programs to promote investment partnerships with large investors remained the main route to gentrification (Czirfusz et al., 2015)—added to this effect. The new municipal urban rehabilitation plan of 1997 explicitly prioritized owners, businesses, and investors over sitting tenants, and the uneven distribution of municipal rehabilitation funds contributed to differences between newly refurbished and newly impoverished areas (Jelinek, 2019). The late socialist antigovernment consensus between sociologist critics of urban poverty and planners eyeing dilapidating historical inner-city districts split in this period. Experts previously engaged in socialist rehabilitation programs now employed their expertise in private consultant firms for market-based projects (Jelinek, 2019), while sociologists emphasized the unfavorable social effects of market-based urban rehabilitation (Erő et al., 1997).

One major result of housing peripheralization was the concentration of urban poverty (with a high proportion of Roma families) in run-down inner-city neighborhoods. Another result of peripheralized households’ efforts to stay close to the opportunities provided by capital was the growth of informal dwellings in peri-urban areas. In research targeting former allotment gardens in the eastern agglomeration of Budapest, András Vigvári found that the first and largest wave of households that built informal dwellings in the area arrived in the early 1990s, having been pushed out of more central locations owing to unemployment, utility debt, and the closure of workers’ homes (Gagyi and Vigvári 2018).

As the following sections highlight, inner-city evictions and the self-organization of homeless people produced conflicts that catalyzed the postsocialist institutionalization of social housing policies and homeless assistance. The “trickling down” of housing poverty to peri-urban and rural areas did not appear as a politicized issue in the early 1990s, but the situations it created had long-term effects in terms of both silent coping strategies and the politicization of poverty. The transformation of peri-urban allotment gardens into informal dwelling areas started continued throughout the next decades and became a regular receiver of new residents pushed out by successive waves of housing crises. The concentration of postsocialist poverty, and especially the Roma poor, in rural pockets of underdevelopment became a recurring topic of social policy debates, and ultimately a main reference point for anti-Roma discourses promoted by new-right movements and the new-right Jobbik Party in the 2000s (Szombati, 2018).

Responses to Inner-City Housing Poverty and Homelessness: Self-Advocacy, Volunteer Social Work, and Professional Homeless Assistance

As described in Chap. 3, by the late 1980s , homelessness had already become the most visible and shocking aspect of housing problems. Effects of the transformation crisis—as described in the introduction to this chapter—only made the situation worse, while the cessation of police repression made homelessness starkly visible in highly frequented inner-city public spaces, propelling homelessness to the foreground of transitional urban politics. This section discusses three main types of actors involved in struggles around extreme housing poverty: affected people’s own initiatives, professional social work activity by politically embedded civil society groups, and volunteer helpers.

From the abovementioned three groups, those actors who assumed a dominant role in the institutionalization of homeless assistance were professional civil society groups with strong connections to new political parties. Some of these initiatives involved former liberal intellectual dissidents who were active in civic groups addressing issues of poverty, and they later became important actors in liberal politics as politicians or professional policymakers. The Foundation for the Support of the Poor (SZETA ) was the most emblematic of these groups. Péter Győri, a SZETA activist and a sociologist working on housing, was one of the main founders of organizations such as the Social Committee for the Homeless and the Shelter Foundation, which were civic initiatives responding to crisis situations and homeless people’s own actions. They later became important models and transmission points for broader social policy programs.

Another part of professional civil society groups involved was charities with connections to the Conservative Party (Hungarian Democratic Forum) founded by the conservative wing of intellectual dissidents. Unlike liberal dissident discourse and activism, engaging with extreme forms of urban poverty such as homelessness or poverty linked to ethnic discrimination, as in the case of the Roma, was less evident in the conservative agenda. The social work profession, established after 1989, had stronger links to liberal circles and was in conflict with the conservatives who formed the first postsocialist government (“the problem of homelessness belonged to the opposition,” Győri & Matern, 1997: 113). The most important partner in the field of homeless assistance for conservative governments, the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service church charity (Malta ), was invited to form a partnership by the first conservative government in 1990 when it was unable to manage an acute shortage of allied professional organizations. (Other church charities also became progressively active in homeless assistance, including the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship, led by a liberal dissident, Gábor Iványi.)

Promoted by professional civil society organizations, a complex system of homeless assistance evolved in the following years, involving shelters, drop-in centers, and social work programs. Homeless assistance became a legal obligation for larger local authorities, and the general issue of homelessness was shifted from the realm of policing to social policy (Misetics, 2017b). Both Malta and the Shelter Foundation’s first projects became models for later social policies, and their founders built careers as policymakers and directors of institutions of homeless assistance and homelessness prevention in Budapest and nationwide. Changes in the political balance between their allied parties defined the development of these two branches of professional homelessness initiatives. The first wave of institutionalization in homeless assistance occurred under a conservative government, while Budapest was under liberal local government. As a result, Malta became more focused on rural and national-level institutions, while Budapest’s institutional system became defined by the line started by Shelter Foundation, in collaboration with a liberal local government. Despite differences in political alliances, professional collaboration remained good between the two branches, shaping social policy across electoral cycles.

In addition to professional organizations, actions by people affected by housing poverty played a key role in politicizing the issue, creating the space for civic organizations to step in as negotiators. The founding of the Social Committee for the Homeless was a reaction to the initiative of a workers’ hostel resident opposing the Budapest Municipality’s plan for significant rent rises. This person, Tibor Ungi, became the only homeless member of the Committee. Later, with the support of the Shelter Foundation, he founded the newspaper Fedél Nélkül, written, edited, and distributed by homeless people (Győri, 2010a: 42).

Homeless people also staged demonstrations in 1989 and 1990, as a reaction to railway stations’ decisions to close their gates for the night during winter. Former dissident intellectuals stepped in as mediators in negotiations with the municipality, and as (co)organizers of new, often short-lived interest groups (such as The National Front of the Poor, or the National Council of the Disadvantaged; Sebály, 2021). SZETA and Péter Győri played an important role in securing a former Workers’ Guard barracks as a temporary home for the homeless people who in autumn 1989 protested the closure of Keleti railway station.

In the beginning, relations between homeless people and social workers were unclear in the management of the barracks (Győri (2010a: 36) quotes one of the inhabitants speaking to a social worker, saying, “What are you doing here?” (…) “On what grounds do you guys tell me when I can come in?”). Later, however, the barracks were established as the first official homeless shelter after 1989, run by the Shelter Foundation, an NGO founded by the municipality and professional civil society groups. Its daily operations were first supported by volunteers, then by part-time and full-time paid staff. Starting from this first shelter, the activity of the Shelter Foundation developed fast to include various branches of social work and a growing network of shelters integrated through a common agenda of social policy. From 1990, this process was helped by Péter Győri’s work as a local government representative in the Budapest local council. By 1991, the Shelter Foundation took over managing entry into the municipality’s workers’ and nurses’ hostels and started to use them for homeless housing—a process that involved conflicts with the municipality as well as the hostels’ inhabitants. In 1993, under the professional leadership of Péter Győri, the Budapest Methodological Center for Social Policy (BMSZKI ) was founded as an integrated homeless service provider for Budapest, with the municipality to maintain it.

Malta’s involvement with homelessness was also sparked by homeless people’s actions. When railway stations again closed their gates in autumn 1990 and the situation started to become tense, the first conservative government reached out to Malta. This choice was motivated by Malta’s good professional reputation (e.g., it took care of the temporary housing of East German refugees in 1989), its lack of obvious political involvement, and its Christian ideological background that placed it close to that of the government (Győri, 2010b: 133–135). Soon, with the support of the Ministry of Social Welfare, Malta set up its first homeless shelter.

Resistance by squatters to eviction was another movement by people affected by housing poverty that professional organizations joined in various ways. Poor families squatting in state apartments, usually of inferior quality, became frequent during the late socialist crisis of state housing. Evictions became widespread after privatization. As many of the urban poor in Budapest were Roma, the eviction of squatters also had an ethnic dimension. Roma organizations founded after the regime change put the issues of housing poverty, evictions, and urban segregation on their agenda (first in Miskolc by the Committee against Ghettoes, and then in Budapest by the Roma Civil Rights Foundation). SZETA and the Shelter Foundation regularly provided legal and professional advice and staged protests. One important—although unsuccessful—movement of common cause with the Roma Civil Rights Foundation was to oppose a law that criminalized squatting in empty local government apartments in 1999. Malta also gained its first homeless families’ shelter by joining protests against the eviction of 22 Roma families in the 14th district in 1991. Seeking to avoid scandal and to get rid of the squatters, the local government offered the building to Malta (Győri, 2010b: 136–137). After the first shelters, Malta developed into a large civic provider that worked in partnership with the state, with a politically less controversial profile.

In addition to affected people and professional civic organizations, volunteers also played a significant role in the process of institutionalizing homeless assistance. Citizens assisted homeless demonstrations, and the first civic institutions of homeless assistance were largely built by unskilled volunteers. As Győri and Matern (1997: 123) put it: “Characteristically enough, the marginal groups of the homeless were helped by relatively marginalized people. Some helpers, however, were social workers, sociologists, teachers, housewives, divorced mothers, and young people seeking a place to live.”

One main characteristic of the institutionalization of homeless assistance that stands out in retrospect is that professional actors became dominant over volunteers and homeless people (“we made them into clients,” Győri reflected on the formation of the Shelter Foundation (Győri, 2010a: 35)). Professional groups’ strong political connections also implied that the institutionalization of homeless support was informed by the dynamics of party politics, although professionals maintained collaborations across political divisions. Reacting to these factors, the criticism of top-down structures of homeless assistance, as well as links between homelessness-related activism and party politics, assumed an important role in successive forms of contention.

Another notable factor that stands out in the long run is the structural limits that homeless assistance encountered in the overwhelming force of housing commodification and shrinking social housing policy. Writing in 2003, Péter Győri characterized BMSZKI as

“an institution of a regime change where (…) the baselines of the new market economy have not been complemented yet by the guarantees of solidarity. (…) This placed BMSZKI (…) in a situation where it simultaneously has to answer the imperative not to let anyone freeze to death and face the problems of the masses who are losing their safe housing—without having the means, as a social care institution, to solve them” (Győri, 2003: 5).

An important aspect of these limitations were the tensions between homeless assistance as an insufficient measure to help the poorest, and its broader background in the housing access problems of low- to middle-income earners. This tension has already made themselves felt in the early process of homeless assistance formation. Those “nurses, teachers, boiler heaters or cleaners” (Győri, 2003: 44) who lived in the municipality’s workers’ and nurses’ hostels and resented the hostels’ being opened for homeless housing were part of those social strata. At the same time, the potential for a broader alliance between these forms of housing activists was also signaled by the presence of low-income volunteers who engaged in homeless assistance initiatives. How struggles concerning the harshest forms of housing poverty relate to low- to middle-income earners’ hardships in accessing affordable housing remained an important question in housing politicization in subsequent decades.

Participative Initiatives in Social Housing and Social Self-Build

In addition to the top-down professionalization tendency in social housing policies and homeless assistance, initiatives to provide solutions for housing poverty through participative solutions were also conducted by civil society and professional groups. Important alliances between social work professionals and people affected by housing poverty toward a horizontal management of social housing were formed in the seventh district in 1992–1993. These attempts only achieved limited success (securing up to nine apartments for families in need). However, the second, the Circle of Applicants for Social Housing, entailed an innovative progressive model whereby local government social workers helped social housing applicants to organize not only as a pressure group but also as a social housing agency. This agency was run in partnership with the municipality, with the participation of people in need of social housing (Sebály, 2021). Although short-lived, this model served as an important example of a participative model for social housing agencies.

In addition to conflicts over social housing and policy, civil society-based house-building programs started in the 1990s. Mostly aimed at the rural poor and (sometimes urban) large families, the Home and Homeland Foundation used the international model of Habitat for Humanity to help those in need by building houses, offering technical and financial help combined with self-build (also in Budapest). Rooted in former right-wing dissident circles, this initiative was connected to conservative politics, and it emphasized local popular traditions of house-building based on mutual help (kaláka) next to a need for active self-help by poor people themselves. In 1996, Habitat broke with Home and Homeland owing to its lack of transparency and to its connections with the extreme right. Habitat established an official branch in Hungary. Habitat Hungary continued social house-building programs until 2008, when it turned more toward maintenance, finance, and policy work.

The Dissipation of Struggles Based on State Tenant Status: The Tenants’ Association

One of the main forms of organization that addressed the housing problems of low- to middle-income earners in the regime change years was the Tenants’ Association. Founded in 1988, the Association was formed to represent the problems of tenants in state-owned Budapest apartments, who faced mounting problems with maintenance owing to cuts in state funds that reduced the capacity of state maintenance companies (Győri & Matern, 1997).

The Association’s membership grew to several thousand in a few months; it managed to win several legal cases and enjoyed relatively broad media success owing to the salience of the maintenance issue and a general atmosphere of dissent against socialist governance (Győri & Matern, 1997: 108–109). However, in the long run, its possibilities remained defined by the contradictions of market transition. In a general situation of lack of funds because of public debt pressure, late socialist maintenance companies were incapable of meeting tenants’ needs even in the face of organized pressure. Instead, the problem of maintenance was eventually “solved” by externalizing it to tenants themselves by privatizing the apartments. As better housing units were privatized first, with the progress of the privatization process, the remaining state tenants consisted increasingly of those in poorer social strata. When facing the dilemma whether to continue to represent tenants and try to survive on a member basis where members are less able to pay membership fees, or rather to follow the interests of the most active members who now looked toward privatizing their own apartments, the Association decided to turn into a multiple interest representation group in the field of housing maintenance. This led to hardships in formulating a coherent agenda. Adding to that, the political alliances the Association formed through closed-door lobbying during the last years of the Kádár era backfired after the regime change, when housing policy responsibilities were shifted between ministries as part of a struggle between old bureaucracy and new expert groups linked to new parties. As a result, the Association lost its status as interest representation partner for housing politics (Győri & Matern, 1997: 116).

A Long-Lasting Structure of Maintenance-Related Interest Representation: The Alliance of Housing Cooperatives

Another, more enduring organization that dealt with maintenance issues for low- to middle-income social strata during the regime change was The National Alliance of Housing Cooperatives. The Alliance was set up as part of the top-down process of creating housing cooperatives by the socialist state. As explained in Chap. 3, housing cooperatives involved a structure wherein the state provided plots, the national savings bank acted as investor and developer, and residents became owners of their apartments. The cooperative format was maintained as a nationwide top-down system of maintenance and interest representation. The National Alliance of Housing Cooperatives acted as the top coordination body of this system and was an official partner of the government in shaping housing policy.

While the number of housing cooperatives remained relatively stable in the decades following the regime change (as some were liquidated but others split), the Alliance has lost members (from 1200 cooperatives in 1990 to 800 in 2018, LOSZ 2018). The cessation of top-down funding shifted the economic burden of representation onto the shoulders of members, which created a vicious circle with the gradual erosion of the Alliance’s special partnership with authorities. This situation also contributed to maintaining a hierarchical operation with relatively low participation by members and active expert representation at the top. Nevertheless, the Alliance remained a strong player in both housing and cooperative policy for about two decades after the regime change. Its influence was mostly exerted in closed-door negotiations with government bodies and other stakeholders, to which the Association was invited as the main representative body and civil expert on housing cooperatives and later private condominiums (the legal form that most previous state tenant houses took after privatization), thus representing hundreds of thousands of households. Only after 1998, when the first Orbán government started to dismantle earlier systems of interest negotiation, did this position of the Alliance of Housing Cooperatives start to erode. After 2010, the supermajority Orbán government canceled the system of social consultation and introduced a new system of invitation-based “strategic partnerships.” Even here, the Alliance’s remaining influence and connections were sufficient to make it the only organization to receive a strategic partnership in the field of housing management and maintenance. However, by this point the partnership was reduced to an empty form: the Alliance could comment on policy plans, but its comments were rarely considered (LOSZ 2018).

In terms of housing privatization, a main issue from the perspective of the Alliance was that it was carried out through forming private condominiums instead of cooperatives. This allowed the state to sidestep the expertise and interest representation power of the then still strong cooperative network and outsource mounting maintenance costs to new owners, often without their knowledge:

“There was an enormous interest in privatizing these [buildings degraded due to lack of funds for maintenance], so the state doesn’t have to carry on the responsibility. (…) This meant that there was a sudden explosion in the number of condominiums in Hungary (…) due to more than 800,000 privatized apartments—and the state made use of the fact that these new condominiums didn’t have any interest representation. Which turned out to be a great problem for the new owners, because it was only when the first general meeting of the first year arrived that they realized the extreme sums they were supposed to spend on maintenance and refurbishment, for which condominiums had no available funds. And by the time they realized this, the story was already over; there was no buyback obligation by the state.” (LOSZ 2018)

By 2000, the Alliance of Housing Cooperatives decided to include the interest representation of condominiums, too, into its activities. This boosted their membership to more than 1400 cooperatives and condominiums (LOSZ 2020). Besides providing welcome aid to its eroding influence, this move made the Alliance the largest organization addressing the problems of housing maintenance that have accumulated since the 1980s and swept under the carpet by privatization.

For a long time, the Alliance remained the most significant organized representative that dealt with housing-related problems of low- to middle-income earners. Although its main focus was on maintenance, its activity also extended to proposing new forms of housing access. Reflecting on the conditions of their constituency and inspired by examples from international networks they entered in the early 1990s, the Alliance worked out proposals for affordable rental cooperative housing, and from 1998, it attempted to introduce them into housing policy.

Mortgage-Based Homeownership: A Silent Challenge

As explained in Chap. 3, under the super-homeownership system created by privatization, acquiring a home became a challenge for new households. After the market freeze in the transformation crisis, reforms successfully established institutional frameworks for the private housing market. Some public funds were allocated to social housing construction and reducing utility prices, and some to savings benefits targeted at middle classes (Misetics, 2017a: 275). However, these measures did little to cover the unmet need for about 40,000 new apartments by the end of the 1990s (LOSZ 2018). The Orbán government’s state-aided housing loans boosted housing lending for middle-income strata after 1998, causing a rise in new constructions, but the subsequent socialist government discontinued the loan subsidy program owing to lack of funds in 2004. The long-accumulated demand for housing loans in low- to middle-income groups contributed to a boom in risky foreign-currency (forex) loans in the second half of the 2000s, creating the conditions for a debt crisis after 2008.

The 2000s: The Mortgage Bubble and Housing Contention in Left- and Right-Leaning Anti-Neoliberal Movements

In terms of housing struggles, the most important development of the 2000s was the mortgage bubble that affected hundreds of thousands of households and grew into a national economic stability problem after 2008. Other manifestations of housing poverty and the housing access problem also invited various forms of contention. In the context of housing movements, a major new element was the rise of broader rightist and leftist movements that questioned the legitimacy of the postsocialist neoliberal system. These movements constituted important reference points for housing initiatives and a source of alliances for activists.

Social Urban Rehabilitation Efforts

While urban rehabilitation in the 1990s prioritized market-based development, the 2000s brought a reorientation of professional actors toward the inclusion of social aspects. This was due to increasing acknowledgment of the social effects of previous regeneration programs and to EU cohesion funds after Hungary’s accession in 2004. As Jelinek (2019) explains, cohesion funds were conceived to counteract the polarizing effects of European neoliberalization and favored exactly the type of socially sensitive urban rehabilitation programs that Hungarian planners and sociologists favored at the turn of the decade. The Magdolna Program for inclusionary urban regeneration in the eighth district of Budapest was the first such program, becoming a national model for rehabilitation programs funded during the 2007–2013 EU period. While in the long term, the program’s social aspect had limitations (owing to conflicts with conservative local governments as well as to market-based real estate appreciation) (Jelinek, 2019), its long-term involvement with social integration in the district created a base of locally embedded civic networks that assumed an important role in local oppositional politics by the end of the 2010s.

Real Estate Speculation

If the eighth district was the main example of social urban rehabilitation through the Magdolna Project, political scandals made the seventh district the most famous case of real estate speculation in the 2000s. This central district with many historical monument buildings in a dilapidated state was the site of the first urban rehabilitation program during the 1980s. After privatization, the contrast between its historical value and run-down state was particularly apparent in houses owned by the local government. During the 2000s, scandals erupted around the local government’s handling of such buildings. In a series of cases, the local government withdrew maintenance to force out tenants and bring down prices, and then it sold buildings to companies connected to local government members at cheap prices. These assets were then sold to offshore companies and from them to foreign buyers (NOL 2008).

While many tenants were pushed out of the inner city by this process, the scandals bore less of a social than a party political character, with socialist mayor György Hunvald being sentenced to jail in 2008, and several liberal and Fidesz representatives also being investigated. ÓVÁS!, an association of planners, historians, and other intellectuals, stressed the loss of the historic core of the Jewish Quarter. Together with the National Office for Heritage Protection and Budapest’s chief architect, they opposed the local government’s rehabilitation plan that allowed the destruction of heritage buildings to make space for new investments. Despite their complaint, the plan was voted in by a majority of Socialist Party and Fidesz representatives (ÓVÁS!, 2008).

ÓVÁS! also supported another type of action that thematized the district’s shady deals. Between 2004 and 2006, the squatter group Centrum occupied several buildings in the inner city, including the affected area of the seventh district. As an anarchist group embedded in the broader alter-globalization scene, Centrum framed occupations as efforts to open an autonomous space within the capitalist market. For the (relatively short) time of the occupations, Centrum operated the buildings as showcases of an alternative anticapitalist movement culture—from free meals and horizontal meetings to art shows and information distribution (Gagyi, 2016). Although Centrum symbolically sided with tenants against real estate speculation, and Centrum members’ other activities involved solidarity actions with the homeless (like Food not Bombs! or the Night of Solidarity), their direct alliances primarily included intellectual groups like ÓVÁS!, alter-globalist activists, and NGOs, as well as cultural workers who supported the idea of squats owing to their experiences in Western capitals.

While Centrum’s attempts to establish a culture of political squatting in Budapest were not successful, in the emptied buildings of the inner seventh district, several pubs appeared that used the squatter aesthetic as a means to achieve a cheap yet cool design. These were established by start-up entrepreneurs from the cultural scene, and they soon started to operate as busy cultural and nightlife centers (Csizmady & Olt, 2014). These “ruin pubs” of Budapest later grew into a major attraction for tourists brought in by newly established cheap airlines. In the face of this new influx of party tourism, the “ruin pubs” worked as a first wave of gentrification that soon grew into an unstoppable source of “overtourism” in the district (Smith et al., 2019). By 2021, the few large ruin pubs that remained from the 2000s era constitute a minority among a sea of commercial entertainment venues, hostels, and Airbnb apartments in the area. The transformation of the district is a continuous point of conflict with remaining permanent residents, while Fidesz-related companies’ takeover of commercial spaces meets fading resistance from previous local entrepreneurs—many facing bankruptcy owing to pandemic-related lockdowns.

New Types of Homeless Advocacy: Man on the Street and the City Is for all

By the second half of the 2000s, a new activist group began to thematize the issue of homelessness as a political question. Inspired by the US tradition of community organization and embedded in a wave of urban activism connected to the alter-globalization movement, activists of the Hungarian branch of the international Humanist Movement funded the organization called Man of the Street in 2004. Working as an activist group of 10–15 members, their aim was to break the issue of housing poverty out of the frames of charity, institutionalized homeless assistance, and social policy, and present it as a political issue that concerns all citizens (Udvarhelyi 2008). Aiming to educate participants to engage personally with political issues, Man on the Street’s most successful event was a regular vigil held in a busy inner-city passageway, where homeless people and supporting activists spent the night together. In addition to political communication, the event’s main aim was to create a situation where homeless and non-homeless people could spend time together and communicate.

Man on the Street wished to reclaim politics from the institutionalized realm of electoral politics, and engagement with homelessness from the institutionalized systems of social care and social policy. This stance, backed by the direct action focus of the 2000s wave of the alter-globalist movement, and in many ways similar to the dissident activism of late socialism, was taken by Man of the Street as a claim for renewal addressed to the social institutions built by former dissidents:

“Man on the Street introduced a completely new framework and practice of civil participation when at our demonstrations average (and mostly young) citizens with no ‘expertise’ and without any obvious affiliation to any professional organization or political party started making demands toward all levels of government and the general public about an issue that had previously been defined strictly as a ‘problem of the social worker’” (Udvarhelyi 2008: 160).

While Man on the Street represented a turn toward grassroots horizontal politics, it still operated on a middle-class base. In a significant move in 2009, Man on the Street activists together with homeless people created the organization The City is For All (Misetics 2017). This was not a unidirectional process initiated by Man of the Street activists, and theirs was not the only organizational expertise. As Gyula Balog, cofounder of The City is For All, affected by homelessness explained:

“For 14 years, I was an activist organizer with Alcoholics Anonymous. I got to know Man on the Street in 2006, and when I understood that they are made up solely by intellectual youngsters, I told them to fuck off. Then in 2009 they found me again and proposed organizing something together. So, this is how The City is For All came together. (…) In socialist times, I used to work in agitation. I was a propagandist; I went to training sessions, I worked as a journalist, and basically I was doing community organizing my whole life, so this type of work suited me.” (The City is For All 2018)

The core steering group of The City is For All consists of 30–50 people. With membership fluctuation, the organization has had hundreds of members over the years. The group has a policy of not formalizing its status legally. Its constitution aims to maintain a majority of homeless members and an internal organization where leadership roles are held by homeless people (Misetics 2009, Udvarhelyi 2012). One illustrative group policy following from that principle is that only homeless members can represent the group publicly. The City is For All’s definition of the issue of homelessness is primarily political; it defines housing deprivation as a violation of the right to housing. In line with this approach, while it provides some forms of direct assistance, more typically it uses methods of protest such as campaigning, occupations, and anti-eviction chains to support its political demands.

Since 2009, The City is for All has grown into one of the most influential activist organizations in the postcrisis waves of progressive activism. Throughout the 2010s, it created a strong network of volunteers and allied organizations and has spawned a series of sister organizations by institutionalizing particular directions of its activities. These organizations are Street Lawyer, a group of lawyers providing legal counseling and representation; the From Street to Housing Association, an NGO that collaborates with local governments to renovate run-down social housing units and uses them to house homeless families and which operates a social housing agency and temporary work agency for homeless people; the School of Public Life, which offers training in activism and advocacy across the country; and Living Independently—In a Community, a grassroots disability rights group (Udverhelyi 2018: 5–6). Through its campaigns and by broadening its alliances, The City is For All became a central actor in the new left political scene that started to develop during the 2000s. Both its claims for housing rights and its model for community self-organization became important inspirations for opposition politics after 2010.

Debtors’ Organization during the Forex Mortgage Crisis

By 2009, hundreds of thousands of families who took up foreign currency-denominated (forex) loans in Swiss Francs during the 2000s saw their monthly budgets destabilized by the sudden spike in their installments caused by the sudden appreciation of CHF versus HUF—a situation made graver by the depreciation of their houses as collateral owing to the freeze of the housing market. Soon, debtors started to organize into information groups to learn about the financial and legal conditions of their situation and to find ways to resolve it. While some groups continued information sharing and mutual support (Chamber of Debtors1, 2018), others initiated collaborations with lawyers over a growing number of mortgage-related court cases (Chamber of Debtors 2018, T. A., 2018, Kásler, 2016), or organized street demonstrations and actions against evictions. To express their demands in political form, most of these groups relied on the vocabulary of nationalist anti-neoliberalism, which by this time had become the dominant framework for expressing popular grievances in the face of postsocialist neoliberal politics.

In its 2010 election campaign, the issue of forex debt was merged into Fidesz’s political narrative of a “national freedom fight” against foreign powers and particularly against financial capital. After the elections, helping forex mortgage crisis victims resist foreign banks became a political message by which the new supermajority Fidesz government continued to address the social grievances previously voiced by new-right movements. In addition to consultations with the Hungarian Banking Association, the government conducted public consultations with representatives of debtors’ advocacy groups such as White Chimney Sweepers, Home Defenders, and the People’s Financial Supervisory Authority (Index 2009). When communicating the preparation of debt crisis measures after 2010, Viktor Orbán himself used language similar to that of debtors’ groups, claiming that those who took forex mortgages were “deceived” by the banks (Napi Gazdaság, 2011). In practice, however, as explained in Chap. 3, the measures served elite and upper middle-class interests, and debtor groups soon found themselves in a position where they needed to oppose a government that spoke their own political language.

Plans for Rental Housing Development

Addressing another aspect of the problem of housing access for low- to middle-income households—the same problem from which the forex debt crisis emerged—the Alliance of Housing Cooperatives worked throughout the 2000s to integrate its proposals for rental housing into broader collaborations with successive Socialist–Liberal coalition governments. The Alliance employed its knowledge of international cooperative rental models and its expertise in Hungarian cooperatives and condominiums, including issues of maintenance, energy efficiency, and social policy aspects such as rental subsidies (LOSZ 2018). Other expert groups were also included in the process, examining the implications of demographic projections, financing, industrial structure, local production of construction materials, or issues of labor supply such as professional training. This complex strategy for housing construction, which included rental housing, was abandoned in 2009 owing to the financial crisis and the political delegitimization and removal of socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány.

After 2010: Housing Struggles in the Orbán Regime

The two most visible conflicts in housing struggles after 2010 developed in the aftermath of the forex mortgage crisis and the government’s criminalization of homelessness. Meanwhile, a new boom in the housing market after 2015 produced a spike in real estate prices, which renewed the pressure of peripheralization on the poor and created growing dissatisfaction among middle-class youth. In terms of movement context, struggles around housing poverty and middle-class housing problems were connected to both new left and opposition politics throughout the opposition movements of the 2010s and became central issues in the 2019 local elections.

On assuming power, Fidesz started a reorganization of the economy in favor of a state-based national oligarchy. Its symbolic politics still honored the discourse of the new-right anti-neoliberal movement wave of the 2000s, but the effect of its practices was to limit and fragment new-right movement organizations and political structures. This shift effectively stifled the voices of groups that had previously politicized social grievances in a nationalist anti-neoliberal framework. This dynamic also affected forex debtors’ groups. Meanwhile, Fidesz stepped up anti-poor, anti-migrant, and anti-minority politics as a means to reinforce the views of the Hungarian majority that its governance benefits. The criminalization of homelessness was part of this tendency.

Forex Mortgage Debtors’ Advocacy after 2010

In the early years following its electoral victory in 2010, Fidesz presented its debt management program as a process that would save Hungarian borrowers from “unfair conditions” set by foreign banks and Socialist–Liberal governments. However, as explained in Chap. 3, in practice its measures served to restabilize the economy and the banking system, and gain space for national capital in banking. Debtor groups soon started to criticize the measures for their lack of effective help, and later remembered their role in Fidesz’s political campaign with bitter disillusionment (Baranyai 2018: 59–60). Jobbik, an opposition party with strong connections to former right-wing movements that also had social demands, expressed its support for debtors in the form of speeches, participation in anti-eviction live chains, and by providing institutional help such as organizing a parliamentary hearing for debtors in 2012. However, facing a supermajority government, Jobbik was unable to provide debtors with effective help, and its support later came to be seen by many debtors’ advocates as mere electoral rhetoric.

The main institutional channel through which debtors could contest their situation was litigation, which became the main front of their struggle. Debtors filed around 60,000 lawsuits between 2013 and 2016 (Portfolio, 2017). As most debtors lacked expertise in the financial and legal complexities of forex mortgaging, the first movement leaders to emerge were typically debtors who could effectively interpret and contest their situation. While Csizmady et al. (2019) found the most common education level among debtors to be vocational school, our interviews confirm Szabó’s (2018) observation that leaders are typically small entrepreneurs, administrative personnel, or (often first-generation) professionals. Leaders often achieved their status through their own legal cases against banks, which became encouraging examples for others. Over time, experts who did not have forex loans themselves—lawyers, judges, and some politicians—also joined the struggle. Lawyers formed groups with shared experience of cases and collaborated in trials. As a lawyer working for banks in the first half of the 2010s, Lajer (2019) mentions that coordination among debtors regarding litigation far superseded that between banks. At the same time, instances of irrelevant or false legal advice as well as profiteering by selling clients standard plaint services were also present (Kuti 2019, T. G., 2018).

The structure of the movement consisted of small groups organized around different leaders. Intergroup politicking, including self-serving competitions between leaders, maintained long-term fragmentation in the movement. The number of actively engaged members in the groups remained small, rarely exceeding ten, while their social media groups reached several hundred. The largest demonstration, organized by Árpád Kásler, a debtor who obtained the first favorable ruling against a bank, reached 10,000 attendees in 2013, while most demonstrations remained within several thousand or hundreds. However, what is notable in contrast to post-2010 protests is that debtors’ demonstrations spread across municipalities and smaller cities across the country and were not limited to the capital.

The path of debtors’ litigation was effectively cut by a series of Supreme Court rulings and following legislation in 2013–2014, by providing a retroactive legal definition of forex lending that annihilated debtors’ main arguments against the legality of loan contracts. They defined the debtors’ intent as a desire to take greater risks for cheaper loans (thus negating the argument that banks provided insufficient information on risks) and introduced the possibility to correct contracts retroactively by eliminating extra costs unilaterally imposed by banks (thus dismissing the argument that exchange rate charges and interest rates unilaterally imposed by banks were unfair and contracts thereby invalid). After the first forex loan law, 13,000 debtors’ lawsuits were closed. After the retroactive redefinition of the borrowers’ intent in forex contracts, most remaining debtors’ suits out of the around 60,000 started since 2011 were lost (Madari 2018).

As explained in Chap. 3, the debt management measures that were introduced based on this legislation (mainly the recalculation of debt based on Central Bank medium rates and the conversion of forex debt to forint) helped wealthier debtors and aided domestic actors to gain a larger share of the domestic financial market but provided little help to low- to middle-income debtors in arrears. After the Forint conversion, the government communicated that the forex debt problem had been solved. Remaining problematic debts were purged from banks’ portfolios through outsourcing to debt collection companies. In this context, some lawyers sought solutions by appealing to the European Court of Justice. Debtors’ activist groups continued their self-help and protest actions in an atmosphere of growing fatigue and desperation. After the unfavorable Supreme Court rulings, their protests targeted government buildings, banks, and bailiffs’ offices as well as the homes of powerful figures of the political–economic regime such as Viktor Orbán or Hungarian bank CEO Sándor Csányi (Index 2013, Ittlakunk.hu, 2013, Krónika 2016, Kuti 2019).

While marginalized in Fidesz-dominated media, debtors’ protests were also ridiculed in liberal opposition media for their protest style and lack of financial expertise. They were also described as a threat due to the extreme political right’s support for their cause (444.hu, 2013; Index, 2010). Faced with legal and political obstruction and slowed by members’ economic hardships, debtor activism lost heart and was reduced to the most active core of the remaining groups. For the parliamentary elections of 2018, most of these groups entered an alliance called the Chamber of Debtors. Although this was the largest alliance in their history, its outreach was limited by individual groups’ small size and low mobilization power; its inauguration demonstration only amounted to a few hundred people. In an attempt to turn to political means after other forms of struggle were rendered ineffective, the Chamber of Debtors reached out to all opposition parties and asked them to sign their proposals.Footnote 1 After Fidesz’s supermajority victory in the 2018 elections, this political wing of the Chamber was discouraged. Some members continued to work through other means, including new collaborations with the Socialist Party and (so far unsuccessful) attempts to reach out to the European Parliament to make the forex debt issue part of the EU’s anti-corruption investigations of Hungary.

While debtors’ groups produced a significant volume of bottom-up expertise on their situation (Kiss, 2018), their struggles remained marked by a strong discrepancy between the levels of expertise drawn on by banks and regulators and those available to affected debtors. In addition to existing power differences, this discrepancy also highlights a lack of alliances with high-level critical expertise, which differentiates these struggles from other post-2008 anti-debt movements, such as the Croatian Frank Association (Rodik, 2015), the Spanish Platform of Mortgage Victims (Sabaté, 2016), or the international Change Finance movement. Apart from the fact that better-situated debtors (to whom higher-level expertise was more readily available) were helped by debt management policies and thus were not motivated to engage in conflict, this lack of alliances was also due to political factors. Despite some attempts to build connections with debtors’ movements—the Hungarian Social Forum was part of the initial coalition around Home Defenders, the student movement HaHa organized an Occupy event together with some debtors’ groups, and The City is For All participated in Debtors’ Chambers’ meetings—leftist groups were discouraged from forming such coalitions by right-wing rhetoric, the focus on homeownership, and debtors’ resistance to taking on homelessness as their own issue. Meanwhile, liberal experts and civic initiatives who engaged with the debt crisis considered forex debt to be an unfortunate but legal construct and instead focused on helping debtors to regain their capacity to pay.

The Criminalization of Homelessness and the Inclusion of Housing Poverty Struggles in Opposition Politics

As explained in Chap. 3, in 2010 the Fidesz government entitled local governments to ban homeless people from designated areas. First applied in the eighth district of Budapest, this law was soon complemented by Budapest Municipality, which introduced a ban on sleeping in public spaces in 2011. Large civic organizations working in homeless assistance, social policy experts, and The City is For All condemned the criminalization of homelessness and called for social measures to ease housing poverty instead. The most visible action was an occupation of eighth district mayor Máté Kocsis’ office in November 2011 by The City is For All and their allies. Occupants were evicted and charged with misdemeanors, but the event was largely publicized. Kocsis rejected demonstrators’ claims, stating that they wanted to let people sleep on the street while the municipality sought to offer them solutions and was spending on new shelters—a reference to the program on new shelters with detention functions mentioned in Chap. 3 (Index, 2011).

In December 2011, parliament made living in public spaces illegal nationally, and prosecutions, including the issuance of fines, started against thousands of people (Udvarhelyi, 2014: 823). The City is For All and its allies organized demonstrations and petitions, pressuring the Constitutional Court to reject the law. As explained in Chap. 3, the Constitutional Court ruled that punishing the homeless for being homeless is unconstitutional; but in March 2013, an amendment to the constitution was passed by the supermajority government that allowed bans on living in public spaces, making Hungary the first country to constitutionalize the criminalization of homelessness (Udvarhelyi, 2014). The City is For All, along with human rights lawyers’ groups and other allies filed a case against anti-homeless legislation at the European Court of Human Rights, continued to monitor legal actions against the homeless and organized petitions and calls for action nationally and internationally.Footnote 2 While these efforts could not change the anti-homeless regulation that had been written into the constitution, they achieved several results. The City is For All won a court case against the demolition of homeless people’s shacks in 2014, creating a precedent that reduced the number of demolitions in subsequent years. It also collaborated with the Budapest Police in reducing anti-homeless discrimination in identity checks (The City is For All 2017). In 2017, The City is For All’s data showed that although the law on rough sleeping as a misdemeanor was still in place, it was no longer enforced (The City is For All 2017).

In 2018, a further aggravation of anti-homeless regulations was introduced into the seventh modification of the constitution, which made living in public space a misdemeanor punishable by incarceration. This time, the Constitutional Court accepted the measure, despite the Shelter Foundation reporting that shelters operate at full capacity nationally and cannot provide new placements (Habitat 2019). While the new measure did not mention shacks, police had been patrolling and distributing leaflets to people living in shacks before it came into force (Kovács, 2019). Several professional groups, from lawyers, social workers, and psychologists to medical doctors expressed their opposition to the law (Merce.hu, 2018). Social policy experts and human rights lawyers expressed their opposition to a new court practice whereby homeless people were only allowed to attend their own trial through a video call from the prison (Győri, 2018). Even though earlier established differences in terms of political alliances were apparent in professional civic organizations’ reactions, their condemnation of the constitutionalization of anti-homeless legislation was unanimous. Miklós Vecsei, president of the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service, also spoke against it (HVG, 2018). In response, Fidesz communication grouped Vecsei together with prominent professionals in homeless assistance such as Péter Győri or Gábor Iványi, who were sympathetic to liberal politics. “They all came from the fake civil society organizations and thinktanks controlled by the liberals, promoting neoliberal economic philosophy and social policy,” claimed an article in the government-backed daily Magyar Idők (2018), which also called these organizations “a Marxist group.”

Data gathered by the Shelter Foundation and The City is For All showed that anti-homeless legislation kept affected people away from frequented areas (and thereby out of the reach of the remaining social services), yet this did not reduce the number of people living on the street, owing to the continuing lack of social housing and the bad conditions or low accessibility of shelters. Social workers and human rights lawyers monitoring cases of police warnings signaled that the prevalence of such cases dropped after the first weeks, which reinforced the understanding that the measures were primarily for intimidation and political communication. Police officers ordered to perform anti-homeless actions also often did not support the idea of punishment instead of social help (Kovács, 2019, The City is For All 2018).

Besides its struggle against anti-homeless regulation, The City is For All continued to work on other planes too. Between 2009 and 2017, it provided consultancy to hundreds of people affected by housing poverty, impeded hundreds of evictions, and reached favorable court decisions in several cases where children were taken from their families because of housing poverty. In 2016, it started a campaign for public toilets in Budapest (The City is For All 2017). Between 2017 and 2019, it worked with tenants threatened by eviction in a tenth district neighborhood, reaching an agreement in the cases of five of the six families it supported (Sebály, 2021: 32).

The City is For All also played an important part in putting housing at the center of opposition politics by the end of the 2010s. Its yearly Walks for Housing increasingly involved middle-class constituencies pressured by the new boom in housing prices. In the run-up to the 2018 parliamentary elections, The City is For All signed an agreement of support with all opposition parties except Jobbik over its housing program.Footnote 3 It also stepped up as a highly visible actor in post-2010 demonstrations against the Orbán regime. While demonstrations were dominated by liberal middle-class constituencies, members of The City is For All promoted a political agenda focusing on social rights and citizens’ self-organization. In 2017 and 2018, The City is For All supported the campaigns of independent candidates (one of them was Péter Győri) in interim local elections in the eighth district. At the 2019 local elections, The City is For All’s cofounder Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi joined the team of eighth district independent candidate András Pikó as head of campaign. In this work, she drew on her experience of the two interim election campaigns, her background in community organizing, knowledge sharing with the international municipalist movement, as well as the embeddedness of local civic networks facilitated by the Magdolna Program. Among other opposition candidates, Pikó won, in large part because of the unanimous political support guaranteed by the unified 2019 opposition coalition. However, his was also the success of a community-based campaign, relying heavily on direct voter contact and involving civic volunteers next to campaign workers (Udvarhelyi, 2019). At the same 2019 local elections, The City is For All also supported the successful campaign of Budapest opposition mayor candidate Gergely Karácsony. Its 2019 Housing March was the main campaign event in which the issue of housing was a central feature of Karácsony’s agenda. After the elections, Udvarhelyi stayed to work with the eighth district local government on community organizing, while another The City is For All cofounder, Bálint Misetics, joined Karácsony’s office as chief adviser on social and housing policy.

A New Real Estate Boom after 2015: Struggles and Silences

As explained in Chap. 3, the second half of the 2010s brought a new real estate boom, owing to favorable state policies as well as a new wave of international investment, and the spread of Airbnb apartments in Budapest central districts serving a new state-aided boom in tourism. The resulting spike in real estate and rent prices brought a new wave of peripheralization of lower income households—from middle-class buyers turning to lower-quality central districts to low-income groups being pushed to substandard urban or peri-urban informal housing.

Conflicts over the Peripheralization of Housing Poverty

Besides serving as a national model for anti-homelessness policies and contestations, the eighth district was also one where the new real estate boom produced the sharpest increase in prices. This was attributable both to a new middle-class inflow and to the stepping up of large-scale urban regeneration projects such as the Corvin redevelopment project that had been stopped by the 2008 crisis and the Orczy Quarter, a new state-backed development project around a new campus of the National University of Public Service (Czirfusz et al., 2015). These developments reinforced the concentration of urban marginalization in pockets of low-quality housing, which has continued since the 1970s (Ladányi & Virag, 2009). The Orczy Quarter project was especially sensitive in this context, as it directly targeted an area with a high density of poor Roma households and it was presented by Máté Kocsis’ local government as converting the district into a “university town” instead of “a ghetto full of criminals” (Kocsis 2012, quoted by Czirfusz et al., 2015: 70).

Two residential blocks housing poor families in the neighboring 10th district became an arena of conflict in this process. These blocks in Hős Street bore the mark of previous waves of poverty peripheralization as well as of newer eighth district policies by which Máté Kocsis’s administration forbade social assistance for drug addicts and then “cleared” the eighth district of drug users using police force. Drug dealers and users started to use Hős Street buildings, and the street became a symbol for poverty and crime. In 2017, the mayor of the 10th district requested government assistance in demolishing the Hős Street blocks. From the funds it received, the local government offered residents compensation that was insufficient to buy even low-quality Budapest apartments, threatened them with eviction, and signed a plan to dedicate a significant amount of funds to building a fence around the blocks, equipped with live surveillance, to control drug-related crime. This caused widespread uproar, from social workers, opposition politicians, and Roma rights organizations to debtors’ advocates. In contesting the plan, Hős Street inhabitants were assisted by an association founded by social workers that has worked in the area since 2014. In 2019, the inhabitants refused to accept the compensation payments for their apartments, and in February 2020, they achieved a favorable court decision whereby the sports complex to be built in place of their homes did not constitute a public interest investment that could justify their eviction (Népszava, 2020). However, in March 2020 the Counter Terrorism Center was granted government funds to demolish the blocks and transform the area for its operations complex (Index, 2020).

New Initiatives for Cohousing, Cooperative Housing, and Social Housing Agencies

Housing pressures increasingly felt by middle-class renters were expressed not only in support for The City is For All’s Walks for Housing or opposition candidates’ housing programs but also in a proliferation of new middle-class initiatives concerning various models of cohousing. In 2018, we interviewed people engaged in seven such initiatives in Budapest, six of which involved people already living together. The initiatives ranged from students’ or young adults’ groups to cohousing projects for the elderly, a temporary community house for divorced mothers, and an initiative for rental cooperatives that aimed to go beyond cohousing and become a scalable model of accessible housing (Cohousing, 2018). Another initiative by a foundation and started in 2016 is a cohousing home for young healthcare workers, in response to the gap between their wages and housing prices (Bíró Alapítvány, 2020). Community Living Hungary, founded by a group of architects, works to popularize the idea of cohousing and facilitate the organization of housing communities.

While all these initiatives share an ambition to go beyond temporary solutions of room rental and combine reductions in housing costs with the social and ecological gains of collective dwelling, there is a difference between those seeking to enhance middle-class options at a certain point of the life course and the rental cooperative initiative that conceives its project in terms of the larger aim to decommodify housing. This project belongs to an alliance between professional organizations and cooperative initiatives that have proposed financial and institutional models for scaling rental cooperative housing in Hungary (Jelinek & Pósfai, 2020). The model is intended to create accessible rental housing for groups with stable but low incomes and reduce the exposure of housing needs to speculative markets. In addition to grassroots organizing and consultancy collaborations with authorities, the rental cooperative project includes collaboration with unions. Following international examples of housing cooperatives started by unions, this work aims to connect workplace advocacy by promoting worker-owned and controlled nonprofit housing solutions.

Targeting rental needs of those in lower income strata, Habitat Hungary and the Metropolitan Research Institute drafted a proposal in 2013 for a social housing agency to allow the use of privately owned empty apartments for accessible rental housing (Hegedűs & Somogyi, 2013). An architects’ professional association, the Association for Home Building (TLE) has emphasized the importance of rental building since 2015 and produced a program for a public benefit rental building model in 2019 (TLE, 2019). Habitat Hungary has campaigned against the rental housing black market and for an accessible rental market through regulation, tax benefits, and nonprofit housing associations since 2017 (Habitat, 2020).

Opposition successes in the 2019 local elections created new possibilities for collaborations with local governments on proposals for accessible rental housing. In partnership with the From Streets to Home Association, the local government of Budapest’s first district initiated a social rental agency in 2020. Placed in one of the most expensive districts of the capital, the program primarily targeted public workers employed in the districts whose wages did not allow buying or renting close to their workplaces (Telex, 2020). Besides state rentals, the program aims to involve owners whose apartments are empty, either because they cannot invest in renovations or because they do not have the capacity or interest to rent them out. In March 2021, From Streets to Home together with the Metropolitan Research Institute initiated a municipality-wide program along the same lines. These plans collided with a bill proposed by the governing party that would have obliged local governments to privatize their housing assets. This move, interpreted by opposition commentators as motivated by the interests of prominent government-backed figures to keep or gain access to first district spaces at a favorable price, could have blocked plans for the social housing agency and further aggravate the housing crisis (Civilizáció, 2021). From Streets to Home and allied organizations carried out a broad campaign to resist the bill. In the end, it was enacted in a softened form, and the Constitutional Court ruled even this unconstitutional (Sebály, 2021), so work on the social housing agency could continue.

Next to civic and professional groups, the issue of rental housing was also flagged by government and market actors. In early 2020, the government announced a new housing program to facilitate the revitalization of rustbelt areas and the building of accessible rental housing. Despite plans for rental housing have been reduced in favor of apartments for sale, by 2020 the need for rental housing had become a prevalent topic owing to market actors recognizing increasing demand as well as to the effects of the pandemic. A major business conference on housing, organized by the financial newspaper Portfolio in September 2020, focused on rental housing , including accessible rental (Portfolio, 2020).

New Context: Opposition Local Governments and the Covid-19 Pandemic

After the 2019 local elections, the new Budapest mayor Gábor Karácsony halted evictions from flats owned by the municipality and together with several local governments won by the opposition party (such as the eighth district) removed local anti-homelessness regulations. Political gestures over homelessness soon became an interface for political conflicts with the government. In personal attacks against opposition local government leaders, government-backed media claimed that they supported sleeping on the street or that Karácsony was assisted by The City is For All and George Soros to establish homeless shelters in Fidesz-majority districts to attract leftist votes for the 2022 elections (HírTV, 2020a). References to crime, garbage, and homeless people living in public spaces became a recurrent topic of campaigns against opposition local governments (HírTV, 2020b). Local conflicts, like the refusal of the mayor of district 23 to allow The City is For All’s sister organization, From Street to Housing, to set up a mobile home were also framed in terms of this political conflict, the district’s mayor arguing that locals did not want homeless people in their neighborhood (Napi.hu, 2020). In another case, a homeless shelter operated by Gábor Iványi’s Evangelical Fellowship church was threatened with closure after the state took the Fellowship’s church status and subsequently cut state funds for its social operations. While opposition groups started a public campaign in support of Iványi, Fidesz media framed the conflict as being about liberal politics instead of a social issue (e.g., Origo, 2020).

Another issue where the context of new opposition local governments and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic intersected was the re-regulation of Airbnb rental apartments. Re-regulation was motivated by the effect of the pandemic on the tourism and hotel industry, a sector where companies with government ties are very active. Reacting to a request by the Hungarian Hotel and Restaurant Association, the government’s tourism agency proposed regulation of short-term apartment rental. The government supported the proposal but outsourced decisions to local governments. This came at a time when many Airbnb apartments stood empty or shifted toward cheaper long-term rental because of the pandemic, contributing to a fall in rental prices especially in central districts (Merce.hu 2020). The regulation of Airbnb had also been part of Karácsony’s agenda—a point promoted by The City is For All and chanted in slogans at the Walk for Homes that contributed to Karácsony’s campaign. Together with other new left organizations, The City is For All initiated a campaign for regulations to prioritize social housing needs. Karácsony’s mayoral office organized hearings where all stakeholders were present and emphasized the effort to reach an understanding that serves the public interest. In the end, Airbnb’s own lobby groups proved stronger and hindered any decisions that would harm their interests.

As the examples mentioned above show, through opposition successes at the 2019 local elections, connections between housing issues, opposition movements, and opposition party politicians were strengthened. On the one hand, this provided more scope for experimentation (as in the case of the social rental agency) and raised the profile of political campaigns by housing groups (as in the case of the anti-Airbnb campaign). On the other hand, it also allowed for electoral logic to dominate housing issues—as seen in the thematization of homelessness in terms of a political conflict between the conservative government and the liberal opposition. Meanwhile, although pandemic effects temporarily reduced rent levels in the capital, and a nationwide moratorium on household debt was imposed as a pandemic measure, continuing market and state investments in real estate and urban regeneration projects signaled a new wave of urban commodification. Next to the plan for rustbelt development, a primary example of this new wave became the “Student City.” A campus development project that was originally planned by the state-backed domestic construction industry, this plan became the target of campus development for the Chinese state-owned Fudan University, financed in large part by Chinese loans (Daily News Hungary, 2021). Here, too, controversy over the Fudan campus became a campaign topic in the 2022 elections, with criticisms of the plan dominated by the logic of opposition politics. In the campaign, symbolic opposition in terms of the East–West geopolitical binary or of Chinese companies versus the “Hungarian economy” overshadowed potential critiques of labor relations or the oligarchic structure of the plan, even for the new leftist movements involved in the opposition alliance. Similar to the new politicization of homelessness, or the Airbnb campaign that remained on a symbolic plane, the Fudan controversy also signals a situation where the stakes of political campaigning in the face of the 2022 elections overshadow closer engagement with specific interest positions in housing issues.

Conclusion: Multiple Actors and Field Transformations

As other observers have previously remarked (Sebály, 2021), the postsocialist history of housing movements in Hungary remains marked by fragmentation. In the framework of the structural field of contention approach proposed in this book, this chapter interpreted this fragmentation as a situation where relatively constant areas of tension—housing poverty and low- to middle-income households’ housing access—are politicized at different movements by different groups embedded in various alliances and political frameworks. It also marked areas of political silence—such as that on the peripheralization of housing or the mortgage boom in the 2000s—as significant in how tensions play out over time. In the relationships between actors, the chapter identified silent parallelisms as well as explicit alliances and conflicts. It showed that in instances of politicization, similar tensions could be associated with different political views and alliances, as it could be with liberal or conservative homeless assistance systems in the 1990s or blocked communication between debtors’ groups and leftist housing activists in the 2010s.

In a historical overview, the chapter traced major transformations of the field of housing contention that reorganized actors’ positions and generated new types of engagement. In the 1990s, such were the intensification of housing poverty and problems of those in low- to middle-income social strata related to maintenance and housing access, to which new initiatives for homeless assistance, struggles around social housing, and the formation of tenants’ and cooperative associations were responses. In the 2000s, examples included the piling up of risky forex mortgage debt in low- to middle-income households and the appearance of a new generation of middle-class activists who questioned previous models of social policy and built new models of housing poverty-related advocacy. After 2008, the bust of the forex mortgage bubble and the new conservative supermajority government set the context for a new constellation of housing struggles. This was marked by the parallel struggle of forex debtors and increasing collaboration between leftist housing activism, middle-class opposition demonstrations, and progressive opposition parties. Chapter 6 reviews how the trajectories of housing movements across these transformations relate to the Romanian case, and what a comparison between the two field constellations can tell us about the potential uses of the structural field of contention approach.