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Czechoslovakia Housing
Planners continued to make efforts to remedy the longstanding
housing shortage in rural and urban regions alike. Since
statistics did not always provide a comparison between the
numbers of households and existing housing units, the housing
deficit remained difficult to gauge. A comparison of the number
of marriages annually and construction of new 1 housing units
between 1960 and 1975 shows that construction exceeded marriages
only in 1975. The deficit was most acute in the 1960s, when an
average of housing units was built for every 10 marriages; in
1985 the ratio rose to an average of 8.8 units per 10 marriages.
This approximation underestimated the housing deficit: it
ignored divorces, the number of extended families living together
who would have preferred separate housing, and the decay of old
housing
(see The Family
, this ch.). Even waiting lists
underestimated how inadequate housing was in the 1980s. Separate
housing for single adults had such a low priority with planners
that single adults found it difficult even to get on a housing
list.
One of the factors contributing to the housing shortage was
the low construction rate of rental housing. Major reasons for
this were high inflation, high construction costs, and low
(heavily subsidized) rents. In 1985 the average building cost for
apartments rose to Kcs2,523 per square meter, and the average
monthly rent--for the seventh consecutive year--was Kcs358 (for
value of the
koruna--see Glossary).
Construction of individual
homes peaked in 1977 at 40,107 and decreased to 29,608 in 1985.
Building a home privately was possible, but acquiring labor and
materials was difficult and sometimes risky; it often meant
borrowing machinery illegally or paying bribes for materials.
Despite substantial gains in the 1970s, Czechoslovakia
entered the 1980s with a housing shortage that was likely to take
years to remedy. In 1986 the government announced a slight
cutback in new housing construction for the 1986-90 housing plan,
further aggravating the situation.
Data as of August 1987
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