Life /
Is there social housing in Poland? [6]
In Poland I often see small dwellings almost like barrack buildings, where really disenfranchised poor people live. I assume these properties are allocated to the tenants. My question is, are the buildings council owned or state owned or are they rent/leased from private landlords. Is the system similar to the UK?
Would need to know more about which barracks where.
A few points to remember,
WWII destroyed vast amounts of housing in Poland and a communist economy couldn't build enough units fast enough to even come close to satisfying demand, those big complexes around every Polish city helped but not enough, up through the 90s the acute lack of housing affected people's lives the way natural disasters do in others. Every possible space (and some impossible ones too) were used.
In the communist era the great majority of housing was government controlled/allocated either through government run housing associations or through housing associations run by large employers (also controlled by the government) and the communists were good at using (continued) access to housing as a method of social control.
The barracks look worse from the outside, a long time ago I knew a family living in barracks (built by Germans just before or during WWII) and they liked it there and they and their neighbors preferred that to the alternatives (mostly those giant apartment buildings) for example despite the real inconveniences they liked having a small plot of ground next to their rooms.
Similarly, the giant apartment buildings are a lot safer and nicer to live in than their equivalents in the UK would be (at least I've been told by more than one Brit).
Poland is basically still untangling the mess that the communists made of housing and while things are far, far better now there are still some old problems (and new ones appearing).
Currently needs-based housing has a huge backlog (many more need it than have access to it).
One good thing about the old system (of of very few) was greater economic integration so that better off and worse off people lived near each other (to the good of both). The poorest weren't separated from the rest of society. One of the worst things about being poor is having to live around other poor people all the time and one of the worse trends in Polish housing in recent years is precisely the classes segregating (esp in larger cities).
The new thing is to try to close the barracks (but many people there want to stay there) and replace them with container housing, effectively dumping all the hardest cases together which will not lead to anything like a good result I predict.
