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Poland Polish Housing in Practice
In practice the housing policy of Polish communist
regimes
was more pragmatic than the Soviet model. In some regions,
high
housing demand inspired locally controlled cooperatives
that
pooled state and private resources. State housing
construction
actually was halted in the 1960s to create demand for
cooperative
housing, for which rents were much higher. Thereafter,
however,
the cooperatives gradually became centralized national
monopolies, and construction in the 1970s was dominated
again by
large state enterprises. The monopoly status of the
builders and
the cooperatives insulated those groups from market
competition
and enabled them to pass along the costs of inefficient
operations to the tenant or to the state.
Under these conditions, housing construction was
extremely
wasteful and inefficient. The economic crisis of 1980
combined
with existing weaknesses in industrial policy to begin a
housing
shortage that lasted through most of the decade. Between
1978 and
1988, annual housing completions dropped by nearly 45
percent,
and investment in housing dropped by nearly 20 percent. At
the
same time, the Polish birth rate added pressure to the
housing
situation. By the late 1980s, the average waiting time to
buy a
house was projected at between fifteen and twenty years if
construction continued at the same rate. The housing
shortage was
a primary cause of social unrest; however, the structural
flaws
of Polish building continued unchanged. Construction
remained of
low quality, builders maintained the monopoly control
granted by
centralized planning, labor productivity dropped, and
distribution and transport remained centralized and
inefficient.
Housing also remained subordinate to industrial goals.
In the
1980s, this meant that new workplaces were the center of
housing
construction activity, which produced dormitories for
workers. By
1988 Poland ranked last in Europe in housing with only 284
dwellings per 1,000 persons; 30 percent of Polish families
did
not have their own housing accommodations; and the average
number
of persons per dwelling was 20 percent above the European
average. In addition, the average usable area per dwelling
in
Poland was 10 to 15 percent below the average for other
socialist
countries and 30 percent below the average for Western
Europe
(see
table 4, Appendix).
Private housing revived somewhat in the 1980s, although
independent cooperatives still faced critical materials
shortages
in the construction stage. An easing of tax regulations
and other
economic changes raised the profitability of private
property in
that period. In 1988 the percentage of housing
construction
projects in which individuals invested had risen to nearly
34
percent from its 1978 level of 26 percent. Although state
investment also rose slightly in that period, both
increases were
at the expense of cooperative investment, which dropped by
10
percent. Nevertheless, in towns privately owned properties
remained insignificant until 1989, mainly because high
inflation
in the 1980s devalued the long-term, low-interest loans
offered
on state property. In 1989 the new government's
anti-inflation
measures realigned such loans with present currency values
and
raised interest rates, stimulating conversion of
two-thirds of
cooperative flats into private property by early 1990. At
the
same time, the monopolistic Central Cooperatives
Association was
split into numerous genuine cooperatives, the state
housing
administration was abolished, and new incentives were
introduced
to stimulate private building and rentals.
Data as of October 1992
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