No place like home
By : Greg Goodale
Skin-deep: Insulation and painting are the tip of the iceberg for housing.
The development of residential housing in Warsaw is on the rise with more homes than ever coming onto the market. Central Statistical Office (GUS) figures show the annual rate of home construction for 2000 increasing to 8.9 units per 1,000 inhabitants compared to 2.37 in 1995. But statistics on new housing projects often fail to tell the whole truth, according to architect Jacek Nowicki.
Nowicki has spent his working life specializing in postwar residential projects in Warsaw and their effects on the city's population. He said new housing construction statistics give no indication of the quality or number of existing homes, so a high figure could conceal inadequate housing stock.
"Figures don't give a good assessment," he said. "As well as the number of new homes you need to know what the existing level of stock is."
Nowicki said Poland's annual housing output has been one of the lowest in Europe since World War II. "For example, in 1961 in the U.S.S.R., Finland and West Germany, the number of new homes per 1,000 inhabitants ranged from 11 to 13, but in Poland this figure was only 4.7," he said.
Two world wars and increasingly misguided approaches to urban design from consecutive communist governments left the city with low-quality stock, now selling at inflated prices. "In 1931, 66.9% of Polish residential stock consisted of one and two-room homes," Nowicki said. "In one-room homes, the average number of persons per room was 3.9, and 2.2 in two-room homes."
For Nowicki there are important similarities between the pre-war and the current state of housing in the capital. "In 1931, rents in commercial developments were so high that people on low incomes had terrible problems finding anywhere to live," he said. "Our present situation is approaching this."
Postwar debt to modernism
This old house: Families still live in grim inter-war apartments.
Between 1948 and 1950 the main sources of inspiration in design were drawn from inter-war modernism. According to Nowicki, these included the city's division into functional zones and generously spaced developments. Houses were three to four floors high and interspersed with greenery, sunlit interiors, roads and wide pavements, he said. The first postwar developments were in Kolo and Mokotow where there was relatively little rubble to clear away.
Nowicki said residential developments dating from this time still had individual character, avoiding the anonymity and homogeneity of later development.
In the immediate postwar period, architectural and urban design were the responsibility of architects, cooperative developers and local government, but after 1948 politicians started interfering in architecture as part of the rising trend of socialist realism.
Monumental follies
Between 1949 and 1955, architecture and urban design became instruments of the country's Stalinist political policy. The new monumentalism aimed to glorify the workers' state. "This led to the construction of monumental, representative architecture that formed a backdrop to grandiose spectacles of propaganda," Nowicki said. The strongest example of this is the area between Warsaw's plac Konstytucji and plac Zbawiciela (MDM) that was recently renovated.
According to Kazimierz Kirejczyk, chairman of REAS Konsulting (http://www.reas.pl), a Warsaw-based housing consultancy and market research firm, the buildings were badly constructed, despite their grandiose appearances. "The structure of the housing had a secondary role," Kirejczyk said. "You can even find apartments that have rooms with no windows."
Nowicki said the socialist realist era ended in 1955-1960 when politicians lost interest in architecture as a political tool, probably as a result of new political masters in post-Stalin Moscow.
Cutting housing costs
In the 1960s, the authorities put increasing pressure on architects and developers to reduce costs as Poland's economic isolation and refusal to accept foreign loans took its toll. The period saw the creation of a variety of moderate-sized developments. The communist government sought to make savings on residential development at any cost to stem the budget deficit.
"Savings were made by lowering the quality of flats, their size and especially the finish and installations without individual toilets or internal doors," Nowicki said.
Kirejczyk said these cost-saving developments were rapidly discontinued as they failed to win over their new inhabitants. Politicians, architects and everyday Poles were outraged by the suggestion that residents of a single floor would have to use common toilets and kitchens. "Fortunately these were exceptional cases," Kirejczyk said.
Prefab factory housing
In the early 1970s, a program was introduced to mass-produce housing developments by basing units on the output of factories, which churned out pre-fabricated construction materials for tower blocks. "The use of prefabricated panels was a catastrophe," Nowicki said, adding that it was expensive and made no allowance for a building's location or the size of the development since it was cheaper to build to a single, uniform design.
Cold concrete: Ursynow's tower blocks offer residents few conveniences.
The same period saw the forcing through of quota-based plans for residential development, which resulted in the homogenized concrete projects on the outskirts of Warsaw and other cities. The developments of the late 1970s lacked schools, shops and other amenities. Resentful Poles, for whom apartments in Bemowo or Ursynow offered little apart from a place to sleep, tagged them blokowiska (block-lands).
This system began years of steady decline as Poland plunged into the deep economic crisis that heralded the social reforms of the 1980s.
According to Kirejczyk, buildings from this period such as Osiedle za Zelazna Brama along Aleja Jana Pawla II are not popular among the city's present homeowners. "People are afraid of old, high-rise buildings because of the poor quality of the lifts and the long, dark corridors." Kirejczyk said.
The years 1978-1979 saw the collapse of the building economy and resulted in a further reduction in the quality of new construction and in the number of completed projects. It was accompanied by a fall in production per 1,000 inhabitants from 7.3 in 1975 (the highest level since 1945) to 1.7 in 1995 across Poland, according to GUS figures.
Back to the present
But the inadequate construction policy of communist governments is only partly to blame for the deteriorating quality of Warsaw's housing stock. "Problems with residential properties on the secondary market in Warsaw are linked to a lack of proper management, minimal maintenance and the initial low quality of the structure, interior finish and installations," Kirejczyk said.
The result is that housing is weighed against middle and lower-income households. "State help in finding credit for homes will resolve this issue," Nowicki said. "Infrastructure, city development issues, land issues, the matter of social services wherever you build houses you have to build schools. These issues must all be resolved."
For Nowicki, the failure of middle and lower-income households to be able to afford homes will inevitably lead to social problems. The main consequence is overcrowding, with two-generation families squeezed into flats of less than 50 square meters, and this number increasing to include three-generation families. A lucky few manage to move out of the city by building or renovating decrepit buildings on the city's fringe, contributing to urban sprawl. Nowicki said this would also contribute to inner-city decay, as ill-maintained housing in the center declines in quality.
Dream houses: Low-rise apartments are highly desirable in Warsaw.
There are mixed opinions about the future. The REAS and Arthur Andersen Warsaw Residential Market Report-2001 indicates that falling demand may lead to a decline in development in the short term.
"Developers report that projects to be completed in the first half of 2001 are experiencing a significantly lower level of sales than comparable projects completed in 2000," the report stated. "As a result the number of completed but unsold units will rise significantly in 2001. It is expected that total unit completions will likely be 15-20% lower than developers originally forecast."
This may not set a trend for the future, however. According to "Housing Construction in Poland 2000-2010," a report published by Denmark's European Construction Research (ECD), the country is experiencing long-term growth in residential construction. "In the year 2010, home construction will reach a total annual level of 248,000 completed homes with a total value of about $6.6 billion, against 81,979 homes in 1999," the report said. "In 1999, home construction had a total value of about $2.7 billion."
The ECD report also said that more housing is under construction than government statistics admit. "A large number of completed buildings are either unregistered or have taken a long time to build. The causes are the desire to use further tax deductions or avoid payment of property taxes. It can also be caused by the desire to hide unofficial income used to finance building work."
