HOUSING.

The development of European housing through the twentieth century was shaped by two major influences. First was the legacy of nineteenth-century industrialization, which brought in its wake urbanization on a scale unknown in history. Much of northern and central Europe witnessed unprecedented population growth, a huge scale of rural to urban migration, and major changes in patterns of social life based above all on the redivision of society into new social classes. The second seminal influence was the traumatic events of the two world wars (1914–1918 and 1939–1945) that shattered the European economy, destroyed millions of homes, and laid waste whole towns and cities. Civilian housing became a target for the war aims of both sides. Both of these issues, the nineteenth-century legacy and the wars, in their different ways created the problem that dominated housing policy in the twentieth century: how to provide enough dwellings at an affordable price for the growing number of households.

A key theme in pan-European housing throughout the era from 1914 to the early twenty-first century was the extent to which state-led solutions or the private market should spearhead the replacement of the nineteenth-century slums and/or repair the damage caused by the two world wars and build up housing stocks. Generally speaking the balance struck was different in different countries depending on political traditions and institutional arrangements.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY LEGACY

What happened to housing policy after 1914, like so much else in society, was largely an inheritance from the nineteenth century. Housing for the new industrial working classes was almost always provided in the privately rented sector either by factory owners who built and then rented at a profit housing for their workers or by rentier capitalists investing in housing as a business. Because wages were low and there was an expectation of profit, the rents that could be charged sustained only the most basic standards. As a result overcrowding was a common experience, with two or more families sharing small rooms or basements. Sanitation was primitive. Toilets, when they existed at all, were shared among dozens of families. For millions of working families water was bought from barrels and human excrement disposed of in so-called soil carts. For the better-off middle classes the coming of new forms of transport in the middle of the century offered the prospect of moving to the "suburbs," where housing was often detached with a garden, offering a much better environment, less prone to the diseases that were endemic in the inner cities.

Architectural forms varied from country to country. In central Europe rapidly growing cities such as Berlin and Budapest developed a tradition of tenement building with small flats facing onto a courtyard and with no outside windows. This was the same in Scotland but not in English cities, where terraces of so called back-to-back, two-story housing (houses facing away from each other and sharing a back wall) was the normal form. In France working-class housing was mainly of the tenement type in Paris but not in smaller towns and cities such as Bordeaux or Amiens. This diversity can be explained only by reference to local housing-market conditions and cultural and social histories; for example, a tradition of tenement building is sometimes associated with cities and towns that had medieval walls. The nineteenth-century legacy was thus one of rapid urbanization, the provision of large quantities of low-amenity housing by private landlords, and considerable diversity in built forms.

Because of the insanitary conditions of slum housing and the continuing shortages of affordable housing, the state became more involved in housing issues in the decades before 1914. What precisely happened varied according to political institutions and traditions. In countries such as Belgium, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, where landlords were an organized part of the political elite, demands by new working-class organizations for the state to be directly involved were resisted. Instead a variety of workers' cooperatives, trade unions, and specially created housing associations built their own housing using cheap loans subsidized by the government. By 1914 in Vienna, for example, 20 percent of residential building had been constructed using cheap government loans. In Berlin cooperative housing flourished, with nearly eleven thousand dwellings built by using government loans by the outbreak of World War I. In Britain private landlords were a disparate, politically unrepresented class, mainly amateurs owning only one or two properties. Here the new Labour Party embraced the state and looked to government to ameliorate the housing conditions of the workers. Beginning in 1919 it was local councils subsidized by central government that spearheaded the housing program for low-income families and went on to own and manage, at its peak in the mid-1970s, nearly one-third of the housing stock. In the mainstream of European housing the British case was unusual.

WORLD WAR I AND THE INTERWAR PERIOD

World War I had a traumatic impact on Europe. Old cultural certainties and social structures were literally shattered. For the first time in history war embraced the whole of society. In the combatant nations, the state conducted the war effort mobilizing and commanding the population of all classes. Revolutionary movements swept across Europe, culminating in the triumph of the Bolsheviks in 1917, leading to the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. Aware of the danger to their own nations, European governments initiated a period of social reconstruction in which nineteenth-century slums began to be cleared away and new visions of a fairer and more equal society emerged. Housing was at the center of this. In Britain the postwar Liberal government was elected on the slogan of building "homes fit for heroes." Drawing on Ebenezer Howard's idea of the "garden suburb" (combining the best of town and country in low-density developments away from the city) and the ideas of the Arts and Crafts estates of "council housing," low-rise, cottage-style terraces began to be built using generous central government subsidies. This was the first genuinely European housing form built on any scale in response to unregulated urbanization.

In the 1930s modernist architects and town planners began to believe it was possible to literally construct a new society. These radical ideas emanated mostly from Germany. From 1928 onward the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) brought together leading modernist architects and had a massive impact on how housing was thought about and how it could shape society, particularly in its advocacy of high-rise building. At the second congress Victor Bourgeois proposed that housing should be a tool for living encompassing the revolutionary idea that every flat should have running water, indoor toilet, bathroom, fully equipped kitchen, and refuse disposal chute. At the third congress in 1930 the Swiss architect Le Corbusier introduced his famous Ville Radieuse (Radiant City), at the center of which were blocks of high-rise flats, where most people would live. In the USSR a deformed variant of high-rise living was already being realized in the 1930s with the appearance of large-scale mass housing in many towns and cities. The "Stalin model" of housing involved the mass production of small, low-amenity flats (often unheated) in huge housing estates for very low rent, putting into practice Stalin's utopian dream of building a socialist society. In reality this dream became a nightmare of repression and appalling housing conditions. When the USSR collapsed in 1991 nearly half the population lived in flats with only two rooms.

THE SUBURBAN WAY OF LIFE

Less dramatic in its impact in the interwar period but significant nevertheless was the continued expansion elsewhere in Europe of middle-class suburbia. This phenomenon is best illustrated in the case of Britain, where millions of owner-occupied semidetached houses were built by thousands of small speculative building companies on estates on greenfield sites. These properties were heavily marketed to the new classes of white-collar workers and came with a distinctive lifestyle built around the nuclear family and a domestic culture that echoed Victorian values. Men went out to work while "housewives" stayed to create an "ideal home." The growing availability of electricity ended dependence on gas and open fires for lighting, heating, and cooking and enabled the mass production of household products such as electric cleaners made by Hoover. The Bendix "automated laundry" saved many hours of toil for women. Servants, who were common throughout the social spectrum before 1914, became too expensive and were replaced by these labor-saving devices. One of the major consequences of all this was that middle-class and upper-working-class standards of living began to converge, although the difference between working-class council estates (state housing) and middle-class estates (owner occupied) was still demarcated by housing design and location.

Suburbanization was a common feature of interwar Europe and was based on the development of more stable salaried incomes. Easier transport (electric trams, the early metro systems, cars) and the availability of mortgage finance began to spread the idea of home ownership across Europe. Many rural communities were traditionally owner occupied—in low-amenity, often self-built dwellings—and the more peripheral and predominantly rural nations of Europe (Ireland, Spain, Greece, and southern Italy, including Sicily) have always had a strong tradition of owner occupation that has persisted up to the present.

Britain is an unusual case. In 1914 almost the entire nation was housed by private landlords, but by the outbreak of World War II, Britain was already becoming a modern home-owning society (more than 30 percent of households by then) with the unusual addition, as has been shown, of a large and expanding state housing program owned and managed almost exclusively by local councils. The private rental sector declined sharply, not least by sales to sitting tenants as landlords quit the market for better investments.

This was not the case in the central Continental nations where private landlords were a much more politically powerful class than they were in Britain. Although wartime rent controls persisted in France and Germany after World War I, as they did in Britain (it was not politically feasible to allow sudden and sharp rent increases after the war), rental subsidies were still considered necessary for post-war economic recovery, and state involvement in housing was everywhere increasing. In Germany the collapse of the economy and hyperinflation under the Weimar Republic caused rents for newly built housing to soar. Without state intervention nothing would have been built under these circumstances. State subsidies to housing companies were paid for by a special tax on owners of housing whose mortgages had been wiped out due to inflation. As a result, house building slowed from prewar levels and the state assumed a very large role in funding the housing program, almost all of it for rent. In other countries, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, where the working-class movement was less organized and the political crisis was less severe, there was more pressure for a return to privately financed renting. New housing for better-off workers' families continued to be built until the early 1930s, when the global economic collapse swept through Europe.

There are thus very different stories to be told nation by nation and between town and countryside, though everywhere the state played a bigger role than before 1914. For the new middle classes—teachers, insurance salesmen, office workers, accountants, civil servants—unaffected by the economic catastrophes that devastated Germany and then the whole Continent in the 1930s, housing conditions and the "ideal home" vision began to take hold. Suburbanization brought with it a new way of life, of residential repose and respectability. But of course for the less well-off millions of working-class families, life continued to be a struggle for daily survival in small, aging, badly maintained flats and houses mostly without gas, electricity, hot water, indoor toilets, or bathrooms. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 heightened these problems and made the prospect of improvement even more distant.

WORLD WAR II AND THE POSTWAR PERIOD

The housing consequences of World War II were devastating. The war set back the advances that had been made before 1939 by a quarter-century. This was the result of the massive level of destruction suffered by the European mainland, with whole towns and cities reduced to rubble by tank battles and aerial bombardment. Equally as significant was large-scale population mobility due to refugees, the breakup of families, and new household formation. Moreover, there was no new building for the duration of the conflict. In Britain, for example, it is estimated on the basis of prewar rates of construction that some 1.75 million properties were lost. Added to the war damage, as a result of the Blitz and "doodlebug" attacks the losses to a stock of eleven million dwellings were very serious. New household formation (some two million during the war) worsened the deficit of dwellings to households, the problem that dominated housing policy for the next three decades. Similar and worse stories can be told for every European country directly involved in the war. As Europe approached mid-century the demand for housing had never been more urgent or the scale of the problem greater.

As was the case after World War I, the state played a major role in the reconstruction period. People expected benefits for the sacrifices of war, and housing was a key social policy objective all over war-torn Europe. Governments had led the war effort, and people expected their governments to lead the peace. Hence, for example, Britain's war leader, Winston Churchill, was swept from power by a landslide victory of the Labour Party in the postwar general election, committed to a state-led emergency house-building program (almost all of which was council housing) and the implementation of a welfare state.

The Communist bloc

Crucially, of course, the political settlement after World War II caused the division of Europe for nearly half a century, from 1946 to 1990, into the Western capitalist nations and an Eastern bloc of socialist states dominated by the USSR. In the Communist bloc, state-led solutions to housing shortages predominated, although private self-help (and self-building) was not uncommon. To begin with, housing was a second priority after rapid industrialization. Until the housing program began, many people commuted long-distance from the countryside to the new factories. The Stalin model of state-built high-rise blocks eventually became a common feature of all these countries, although the timing, quality of the building, and degree of state control varied from country to country. For example, after the 1956 revolution against communism in Hungary the housing program was accelerated and incorporated a substantial number of statebuilt but privately owned flats. In Bulgaria high-rise building did not begin on a large scale until the 1980s, and here low-amenity state-built flats were sold rather than let.

In Eastern bloc nations new flats were often allocated to people favorably positioned in the Communist Party or as an inducement to key workers—teachers, engineers, and medics—to relocate to where they were needed. It was only toward the end of the communist era in the 1980s that waiting lists more generally catered to ordinary working families. The built environment was altered through the development of high-rise housing mainly in larger towns and cities, but low-rise properties continued to be built—mostly by self-building—although the extent of this varied considerably from country to country. In Hungary, where there was financial support for some forms of private self-build construction, 80 percent of new house building was of this type, whereas in Romania, under the bizarrely deformed Stalinist regime of President Nicolae Ceausescu, such activity was outlawed.

Western Europe

In Western Europe new technologies involving the same prefabricated building techniques familiar in the USSR and emanating from the modernist prewar architectural movements quickly led to the large-scale industrialized building of high-rise blocks of flats. This was partly a response to slum clearance but mainly to the idea that bombed-out sites from the war could contain much higher densities of people if the housing was built vertically. Although built and managed by governments or social housing agencies with state subsidies, this new housing, unlike that of the Communist bloc states, was almost exclusively used to house low-income households, and despite attempts to engineer a social mix of population these huge estates often became sources of social tension. For two decades beginning at the end of the 1950s high-rise housing transformed the skylines of many northern and central European towns and cities. Almost all of this form of state-led construction was social housing, owned and managed by a variety of nonprofit companies, housing associations, and co-ops and overseen by local and federal governments. Only in the United Kingdom did local authorities exclusively manage social housing. Once the social defects of this form of housing became apparent its popularity and use declined sharply in the mid-1970s.

After the worst problems of postwar shortages and reconstruction were dealt with, private sector housing, especially home ownership, also made a major contribution to the housing recovery that dominated the two or three decades after 1945. This was clearly the case in some of the more peripheral, more agricultural countries such as Ireland, Spain, and Greece, where, despite rapid industrialization and postwar modernization, housing never encompassed strong state involvement apart from indirect support through their tax systems. Finland also had a long tradition of home ownership, and the share of owner-occupiers grew from 57 percent in the early 1960s to nearly 70 percent by 2004. Most other countries also saw some growth in home ownership in the later decades of the century, but the scale varied from country to country. Home ownership in Italy grew from 45 percent after the war to nearly 70 percent by 2004, whereas Germany only moved from 25 percent to 38 percent over the same period. The most unusual case here is Britain, which, as explained above, after 1914 began a long process of transition away from being a privately rented nation (90 percent of households), as the state sector of council housing was expanded and home ownership became more popular and widespread. These interwar trends simply carried on after the immediate postwar crisis abated, and by the early 1990s home ownership had grown to 70 percent of households, although council housing had declined significantly as a result of government policy.

It should also be noted that since the collapse of the Eastern European socialist states in 1989–1990 there has been a large-scale sale of state flats, usually to sitting tenants, because the economies of these countries were so damaged that they could not sustain even the most basic services and maintenance. In 2005 home ownership was in excess of 90 percent in almost all these nations and there was hardly any social housing provision. The creation of super-owner-occupied nations is one of the more perverse consequences of the collapse of state socialism.

In most of the major economies of Europe, however, the state continues to play a significant role in housing. This mainly operates through the mechanism of local authorities supervising rent levels so that the various public housing agencies and the private rented sector are treated as a common rental market in which the companies compete with each other on the basis of type of accommodation, location, and facilities.

It is possible, then, to identify two broad models of European housing in the early twenty-first century. In the social market economies of central Europe and Scandinavia, public and private renting are basically treated as a unified market, and while home ownership is available, it is not the dominant force. In the home-owning societies (Britain, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Greece, and the postcommunist nations) there is a clear separation between the three main housing tenures of home ownership, private renting, and social housing, and the public and private rental sectors are not connected. Thus, while the deficit between dwellings and households caused by two wars was a Europe-wide phenomenon, the ways in which that deficit has been addressed since 1945 have varied considerably, and in the early twenty-first century there is no one "European" housing system.

See alsoArchitecture; Reconstruction; Welfare State; Working Class.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burnett, John. (1986) A Social History of Housing. 2nd ed. London, 1986. An account of the development of British housing from the Industrial Revolution to the 1980s, with a focus on architectural styles and social conditions.

Donner, Christian. Housing Policies in the European Union: Theory and Practice. Vienna, 2000. Incorporates short historical accounts and up-to-date statistics on all the European Union countries (not those later acceded from the former Communist bloc).

Lowe, Stuart, and Sasha Tsenkova, eds. Housing Change in East and Central Europe: Integration or Fragmentation? Aldershot, U.K., 2003. Collection of papers that give brief accounts of the communist era followed by research findings on the next fifteen years.

McCrone, Gavin, and Mark Stephens. Housing Policy in Britain and Europe. London, 1995. A mixture of one-country studies (includes the list in Power's book but includes Spain and the Netherlands) and chapters dealing with European integration, labor mobility, and mortgage finance.

Power, Anne. Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850. London, 1993. Detailed accounts of housing policy in France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, and Ireland with an emphasis on the role played by the state.

Stuart Lowe