Conceptualising the conservative housing regime: the case of Hungary

Abstract

Compared to liberalism and social democracy, conservative ideology is presented in the literature to have had an ambiguous and much less significant influence on housing policy-making. The article argues that alongside measures facilitating the commodification of housing based in liberal ideology and those fostering the de-commodification of housing rooted in social democracy, the conservative idea of promoting little-commodified family property ownership as an antidote to proletarianisation brought about by capitalism and the guarantee of social stability has also underlain housing policy-making in various countries and eras. Based on works synthesising conservative political philosophy and the housing literature, characteristics of a conservative housing regime are defined. The construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of the Hungarian conservative housing regime over the past 120 years is then reviewed to trace mechanisms and conditions contributing to the enduring significance of the paradigm. The article concludes that strong conservative orientation of the country’s early housing policies, the forceful retrenchment of this housing paradigm during state socialism and the disillusionment with neoliberalism after the 2009 mortgage crisis are the main causes behind the (re-)construction of a markedly conservative housing regime in Hungary in the past decade.

KEYWORDS: :

• Housing
• housing regime
• conservatism
• path dependence
• ideology
• Hungary

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Csaba Jelinek and Violetta Zentai for their comments on the early draft of the paper, and Sebastian Kohl and Manuel Aalbers for their valuable insights. The article also benefitted from the recommendations provided by the anonymous referees for which I am also thankful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The ‘Proudhonian’ wing of the international labour movement also favoured the promotion of home ownership instead of non-profit renting. In a few Nordic countries this approach dominated social democratic housing policy, assisting people to access home ownership with some limitations of their ownership rights (price control at resale, state as primary purchaser at resale, etc.). Although this approach bears similarities with the conservative housing paradigm, its high egalitarianism is an important difference (Kohl, 2018).

2 It is indicative that even some urban housing programmes were influenced by the efforts of conservatives to hinder urbanisation and proletarianisation. As an urban forerunner of oncsa, the ‘Peripheral Estate’ completed in the outskirts of Budapest between 1934 and 1939 consisted of single-family houses with allotment gardens. Working-class beneficiaries were obliged to cultivate their gardens to ‘hinder their proletarianisation’ (Gyáni, 1991, p. 141; Umbrai, 2007, pp. 194–200).

Additional information

Funding

The study was carried out in the framework of the research programme ‘Transforming local housing markets in major Hungarian cities’ (ID number K 131534) funded by the Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovaciós Alap (National Research, Development and Innovation Office).