It's time to take to the streets!
How to live well under capitalism? A practical answer to this question satisfies almost no one in Poland - for thirty-five years. Is capitalism or its native variety to blame? After all, in one version of this system, housing does not have to be a mere commodity or speculative "investment product" at all.
Communism, communism, socialism, socialism and derivatives - these terms Poles like to treat as epithets and bandy them about unacceptable solutions in every field. It's different with capitalism. Occasionally, only the left will mutter something about capitalism: inequality, exploitation, pathologies, and even this carefully, so as not to ridicule themselves with rhetoric straight out of communist propaganda. The rest seem to travesty the old slogan, saying "capitalism yes, distortions - no," and are unable to find an alternative to the system in force in the country. Valid in practice, because, after all, in theory, the Constitution speaks of a "social market economy," that is, a system, yes, based on private property, but without the sharpest fangs and claws of modern capitalism in its globalized version.
In the 1990s, however, we indulged in turbo-capitalism in practice almost without the soothing admixture of the adjective "social." Later - having recognized its greatest distortions - we began to straighten out some of them. However - with minor exceptions - not in housing and related space planning. Thus, we heard the phrase "housing problem" in the People's Republic, during the transition, and we hear it now - in a time of fluid and unpredictable globalization. It invariably has one common denominator: the problems of the average citizen with access to meaningful housing.
A complex of municipal buildings on Opolska Street in Poznań - the largest municipal housing project in Poznań in the last three decades, view from the second half of 2022
Photo: © Zarząd Komunalnych Zasobów Lokalowych Poznań | www.zkzl.poznan.pl
The solution to the problem, however, is not just the need to produce hundreds of thousands or millions more apartments, postulated to the point of boredom. Estimates vary widely here, after all. One thing we know roughly is that new square meters are in short supply primarily in large cities, which suck out the provincial population. The low supply of housing, therefore, is only one, spotty component of the "housing problem," which - essentially - has two facets: individual and urban.
In the first, individual aspect, before 1989, the housing problem meant perpetual scarcity, abysmal workmanship, long waits for the usually cooperative housing, and not very clear criteria for waiting in line (shortening the wait was one of the demands of August '80). Today, the problem is prohibitive purchase prices or the cost of renting an apartment, many years of being tied down by credit, mediocre or poor quality housing and, averaging out, the kind of location they are.
The second aspect: urbanism. During the communist era, it manifested itself in unfinished and partly economically irrational settlement or land-use projects, with then poor access to services and efficient public transportation. Today, the problem is haphazard locations and rationalization taken to the point of absurdity: development density due to "PUM squeezing." Added to this is chaotic suburbanization and its disastrous economic and social consequences, poor functional and spatial connections with the surroundings, and adverse impact on larger urban structures.
Despite the current drawbacks, it is rare for anyone to quantify this state of affairs by straining angrily: "pure capitalism!". Instead, the phrase "pat-development" has taken hold, rather late but widely. Developers, seen for years almost as benefactors, without whom Poles would be homeless, began to be treated in a more realistic way. The epithet entered the language permanently thanks to Jan Spiewak, and recently found its way into the title of another book describing the phenomenon. The mechanisms governing a significant area of the housing market were recently described in great depth by Bartosz Jozefiak in a partially incarnated (bravo!) documentary book "Patodeweloperka. This is not a country to live in." Alternatively, the work could also have been called "Optimization," i.e. cutting costs on whatever you can, as long as you pad your margins. The characters quoted by Jozefiak talk about optimization almost constantly. This is nothing new, by the way: in the People's Republic of Poland "optimization" was also practiced, both systemically - by introducing extremely cost-saving norms, as well as in detail and unofficially - by lowering in practice the quality and parameters of the materials used. The motivations or reasons for optimization were different, but always behind them was the logic of a simple economist fighting for immediate profit, savings or personal benefit. One who is concerned only with the here and now. Meanwhile, in the case of apartments standing for decades, the lack of tools to force such economists to act more forward-looking is simply a scandal.
Dense and haphazardly located development in a rural area, Poznansky estate in Czapura near Poznan
Photo: Jakub Głaz
Preventing polemical voices: this simplified description is based not only on the sum of years of observations, opinions and reading, but also on numbers. Statistics clearly show that we are consistently at the tail of EU countries when it comes to the quality of housing and the number of square meters per head. Nearly 36 percent of Poles live in overcrowded dwellings, which is nearly 20 percent above the EU average. The average square meter of an apartment in Poland, on the other hand, is 20 square meters lower. To make matters worse, in large cities the ratio has recently begun to fall, as more and more smaller units are arriving, trimmed for the declining creditworthiness of buyers. So, contrary to predictions, the invisible hand of the market, an empty but catchy slogan from the 1990s, has not led to an improvement in the situation. Wages have risen, living standards have risen, unemployment is one of the lowest in Europe, yet we live in a mediocre way, to say the least. How could this happen?
First of all, we were unlucky. At the dawn of the 1990s, switching to a new system, we might have thought that - indeed - we were adopting a social market economy, which brought Western countries a magnificent three post-war decades of prosperity with their extensive public and social housing sector. Only that by the end of the 1980s, the dismantling of this order carried out in a neoliberal spirit was already underway. Margaret Thatcher had just gotten rid of the government's dragging problem - by selling some 2.5 million public housing units to their tenants at a favorable price.
Prior to Thatcher's revolution, the British public sector owned nearly a third of the housing stock. Such a large percentage gave it the power to shape housing access and rent policy. Today, capital rules, and the cost of housing has increased several times since the 1980s.
Britain's example was followed in the 1990s by Germany, which today also faces a "housing problem" in its national issue. Here, however, much of the public housing stock has passed not into the hands of individual owners, but into private funds. After accumulating a sufficiently large number of apartments, they began to elevate rental prices. Tenants protested against this in an organized way, and Berlin even held a referendum in 2021, in which residents explicitly voted in favor of expropriating (from 240,000 apartments!) the largest investment funds. Nothing of the sort happened, however. On the other hand, the freezing of the amount of most rents introduced by the Berlin authorities was annulled by the German Constitutional Court.
Suburbanization - a "patchwork" development in Zalasewo near Swarzędz
photo: Jakub Głaz
Secondly, today's situation was influenced by housing pathologies from the communist era. Anything that was in opposition to the solutions of that era appeared to be the correct action. The slogan of the "sacred right to property", pulled out of nowhere, reigned supreme (that this supposed sanctity is limited by a series of laws has to be explained to adult people to this day), and the empowerment of the citizen was seen in enfranchising him on the square meters he occupied. Hence the ill-considered privatization of existing cooperative housing and handing over the construction of new meters to the private sector. Escaping into one's own apartment gave people hope of independence from the inept public or cooperative "tenement". Somewhere in the back of one's mind lurked the fear of the return of the real, pre-war tenant, dictating higher and higher prices, having nothing to do with quality and throwing people out on the pavement (this vision, by the way, proved true in the case of the so-called "tenement cleaners").
And so housing - one of man's basic needs - moved from the category of "service of special importance" to a compartment labeled "commodity like any other." Everyone probably believed in the sense of such a solution, since even the penultimate communist prime minister Zbigniew Messner said in the first years of the new regime that "housing is a commodity and must cost money." However, he astutely noted the complexity of the issue. He said that in order to solve the housing problem, it cannot be isolated, but "one must talk about [...] socio-economic policy."
This, however, did not happen. Instead, we got a lot of solutions unconnected to each other in a long-term meaningful strategy: the launch of increasingly widely available mortgages (including the famous franking credits), sudden (and abandoned rather quickly) vague actions to stimulate the state's construction of so many and so many apartments, various types of loan subsidies to stimulate demand for developer products. On top of this, after joining the European Union, capital flowed into Poland investing in real estate and pushing up its prices until a sizable correction after the 2008 crisis.
All this, together with insufficient systemic stimulation of communal and social construction, has led to a situation where developers have almost monopolized as a group the market for the production of residential square meters and are imposing their rules. For several years now, moreover, they have been supplying not only "goods", but also a well-interested capital investment. So attractive that it doesn't even need to be finished and rented out. It's enough that it stands and gets more expensive, helped greatly by the persistent failure to impose a cadastral tax on those units that do not serve the owner's housing needs.
An exception to the rule: the dense but very well-designed Nowy Strzeszyn development in Poznań, 2021-24, proj.: INSOMIA
photo: Jakub Głaz
It's worth noting the paradox here: escaping into ownership from dependence on the archetype of the unethical capitalist landlord and risky (because not sufficiently regulated by the state) rental, we fell into the arms of capitalist developers, banks offering credit for a silly thirty years, and more recently into the hands of rental housing funds. After 1989, the balancing business of municipal and cooperative housing froze instead. Housing from communal and municipal resources, moreover, was also privatized, with decisions on the matter made arbitrarily in various localities. In 1995, there were one million seven hundred and thirty thousand municipal housing units in the country. Two years ago - almost a million less! For the past decade, public housing has been recovering somewhat, but very slowly and on a relatively small scale.
Against this backdrop, most hopeful were the activities of communal and private housing associations introduced by the so-called housing constitution in 1995. The apt idea of building rental housing with tenant participation was taken, among other things, from the French moderate-rent housing program. An ideal solution for those unable or unwilling to burden themselves with a mortgage, while earning too much to have a chance at a public housing unit. At the end of the first decade of this century, however, the tap on preferential loans for TBS investments was turned off at the national level for several years. In 2009, there was an astonishing (difficult to explain without conspiracy theories) liquidation of the National Housing Fund. TBS caught as such a breath after 2015. At the beginning of this decade, in turn, Social Housing Initiatives (SIM) were introduced for small and medium-sized cities.
This is how the field was given over to the private sector catching its breath after the collapse of the global financial crisis. The oxygen was, moreover, provided by state subsidies for individual loans. By then, the development sector had already managed to become highly professionalized and - in part - internationalized. It had solidified enough to start dictating the rules of the game in almost every aspect: prices, quality, location. To this day it is amusing to listen to explanations that if customers did not like the developer's creations, they would not buy them. Well, contrary to incantations, the so-called customer market in the case of housing rarely works - usually in a moment of sudden crisis. After all, unlike a car or a TV, a roof over your head is a necessity. Are you picky? You don't live. Those offering housing have a huge advantage over the buyer or renter, because the alternative to private ownership is scarce.
It also has a powerful hold over architects in the sector today. Paradoxically, designers had much more say in the wild capitalism era of the 1990s, when fledgling developers trusted their expertise and professionalism. Today, as Jozefiak illustrates with examples, apartment sizes, their standard and quality are usually decided by developers' marketing departments, cost estimators and banks. The latter inform the developer about the current creditworthiness of the average Pole, and the maximum square meterage is then set under this creditworthiness. Whether it is sufficient and can be functionally divided is usually of little interest to investors. Especially since after the sale it will not be them who will manage the sub-standard they have created, but the housing communities, legendary for many reasons.
A significant number of architects (of course, not all) designing today's housing (as well as non-residential "micro-apartments"), create not so much places to live, but "investment products". At Szczecin's Westival, Jakub Krzysztofik recently compared today's apartments to bitcoin, and he was very right. Anyway, architects are aware of this. The architectural community has for so long (sometimes willingly) succumbed to the myth of a free market without the necessary precise regulations that it has found itself in a dead end street, from which the only escape for some designers can be a change of profession.
Architects are also aware that a significant part of the housing projects signed with their names deviate from the rules of decent urban planning. They know full well that it is too dense, playgrounds are cursory, common spaces are too small, cramped courtyards are poorly ventilated, greenery is vestigial, and so on. They are also often well aware that local plans allowing such blunders are often sewn, with the blessing of local authorities, under the maximization of private profits. Often these are "plans for the past" enacted after the issuance of development conditions or permits that are favorable to investors; plans that cannot be enacted more orderly without paying compensation for the reduction of profits estimated on the basis of administrative decisions already issued.
Is there then a way out of the situation? After all, the free market does not always lead to such pathologies. An example is Vienna, almost always cited in such cases. Vienna, which for a century has consistently developed and maintained a widely expanded and diversified structure of municipal resources. Vienna, which - also thanks to these resident-friendly policies and sensible rents - continues to win in rankings of the best cities to live in. The Austrian capital provides proof that in a capitalist system it is possible to pursue a truly pro-social and pro-urban housing policy that cares about accessibility on the one hand and the proper development of the urban structure on the other. This is also shown by examples from more recent decades in other European countries. And if it can be done, it must be done. It will succeed, however, provided, as Messner said, that the transformation involves a significant part of the socio-economic system. And that the catchphrases about the sacred right of property, the invisible hand of the market and "communist" ideas about public housing are thrown in the trash.
The question is who would take charge of this transformation - calculated not for one parliamentary term, but for decades to come. And what could lead to a change in the lousy status quo? Politicians are dumb and not very smart, architects - powerless, and local government officials have somehow muscled their way through the whole situation. All hope in the developers! If they raise prices per square meter a little more, then maybe the youth, who can no longer afford a decent apartment today, will finally take to the streets in protest and will not leave them for so long, until they force the necessary changes.
Jakub Głaz
more: A&B 09/2024 - CITY, ARCHITECTURE, CAPITALISM,
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