Social Exclusion and the Housing Estates

Abstract

Housing estates are peculiar segments of the housing market due to their scale, location, homogenity and Tast but not least their social structure. Housing estates cannot be considered merely as products of the former state-socialist system since they can also be found in Western Europe, but the problems related to housing estates turn up in the East-Central European countries more severe, since the number of dwellings located on housing estates and consequently their weight on the housing market go far beyond the West-European scales.

According to our hypothesis the remnants of public housing stock especially the less popular and marketable forms like high rise housing estates are now becoming the shelter of urban poor increasingly in post-socialist cities. Thus, housing policy (or the lack of it) and the functioning of housing market contribute actively to the marginalisation and exclusion of certain social groups. In this paper we highlight some of the characteristics of social exclusion in Budapest using the example of high-rise housing estates. First the genesis of housing estates and the transformation of housing policy after 1989 are discussed. Then the empirical part of the paper draws findings from household interviews carried out at one of the typical problematic housing estates of Budapest, the Havanna housing estate. During our research special emphasis has been paid to the mechanism of exclusion, deprivation, lack of resources, acces to public services. Special attention is paid to factors of social exclusion such as ethnicity, poverty, labour market situation etc.