Migration out of Budapest due to house prices

Conference Home ownership in Europe: policy and research issues 23/24 November 2006, Delft WORKSHOP 1 Chair: Hannu Ruonavaara Session A Friday, 11.00 –12.30 Gábor Csanádi and Adrienne Csizmady (Centre for Regional and Urban Research, ELTE University Budapest) Migration out of Budapest due to house prices Pascal de Decker (Hogeschool Gent & Hogeschool WenK Sint-Lucas) Is the Belgium housing model crumbling off? Manuel B. Aalbers (Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam) Place-based and race-based exclusion from mortgage loans: New evidence from the Netherlands Session B Friday, 13.30– 15.00 József Hegedüs and Nóra Teller (Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest) Security and insecurity aspects of home ownership in Hungary – interaction of preconditions and motivations Hedvig Vestergaard (Department of Housing and Urban Renewal, Danish Building Research Institute) The single-family detached housing; a branche of paradise or a problem? Barbara Klomp (OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology) Improvement of information for owner-occupiers about the quality of their house Migration out of Budapest due to house prices Gábor Csanádi – Adrienne Csizmady [email protected] ELTE University Budapest Centre for Regional and Urban Research During the last decade in Central-Eastern-Europe the political and economic factors increased spatial mobility. In sociological terms there are different status-groups within the masses changing their place of living. The higher status groups used the opening possibilities to strengthen their status by the spatial mobility while the poor were forced to move to less advantageous segments of the city or the country. These phenomena are the consequences partly of spontaneous factors and partly of several policies of the states and local governments. The effects of market forces in these countries can be taken as spontaneous factors and they increased the western type suburbanization around bigger cities of Eastern Europe. Several measures of states and local governments made these effects more vivid helping the higher status groups to move to favourable areas around the cities. The same housing and income policy measures could increase the risk of concentration of poverty on certain areas of cities and also they resulted in the not-well-know-mobility of lower strata. These urban groups had to move out of the city because it became too expensive for them to live there. As far as they are poor they are unable to find places on high or middle status suburban areas around the cities, they have to move to distant poor areas of the country. As a summarized result we can say that they move back to those villages where their families lived after the Second World War. From these places the socialist industrialisation forced the parents of these groups to move to industrial centres leaving behind the villages getting poorer and poorer. Now the sons of the victims of socialist industrialisation have to move back to these poor villages. It is a temporary solution of their housing problems but the danger of unemployment is higher in these areas so it is a questionable solution. In the paper we raise the question to what extent are the urban policies responsible for the forced migration of the lower strata of the societies. We shall demonstrate that the privatization policy of the state is often responsible for the above mentioned increasing segregational results. Also the measures taken by local governments in this system can have exclusionary nature as far as their interest is very often to try to force the poor people out of their territory instead of integrating them. Is the Belgium housing model crumbling off?