Transition from the Hidden Homeless World of Socialism to the Quasi-welfare Social Safety Net

Abstract

In Hungary after the 2nd World War the homelessness has reappeared in the 1990's as kind of social problem and also as phenomenon. The intention of my study is to show how the homelessness became visible to society, what caused that the problem had was noticed so late, and how the homeless people were before part of the society even at a latent way. My fieldwork was carried out after 2002 in Szeged, a city in southern Hungary. During the research I participated in the everyday lives of homeless groups as an observer and I conducted interviews and I exam the social networks, problems and possibilities of homeless.

In my study I show that the Hungarian circumstances, politics and structural changes how far different from Westerns's are which had taken different historical-economic stages, moreover how these influence the fate of who's becoming homeless. Some 18 years passed after the political transformation, however, those years' special opportunities, limits and changes left their marks on the poorness and homeless of the present time.