A former school building in Budapest is being converted into the city's first new social housing in 25 years, with support from the European Union and the city administration.
The €6.2 million project at 39–43 Baross Street in Újpest is 80% funded by the EU, with the first tenants expected to move in early next year. Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony said the development comes as the Hungarian capital faces a worsening housing crisis.
"In terms of property prices, nowhere in the European Union has seen such sharp increases in recent years as Budapest," Karácsony said, arguing the surge reflected "the impact of all the misguided housing policy measures of recent decades."
Converting the former school into homes has brought some unexpected advantages, according to Balázs Humayer, professional lead of the AHA Budapest (Affordable Housing for All) project.
"The school building's classrooms were designed with relatively wide corridors for the children," Humayer said. "For housing, we don't need such generous circulation space, so we have been able to push out the walls of the flats by 35–40% compared with the former classrooms, creating additional living space."
The AHA programme aims to tackle Budapest's housing shortage through co-funding from the European Urban Initiative (EUI). As part of the project, vacant and unused buildings across the city are being assessed to determine whether they should be converted into housing, redeveloped or sold, with technical, financial and social factors all taken into account.
"There may be cases where demolition or sale is a more rational decision than conversion, so under AHA Budapest we are developing a methodology to assess this," Humayer said.
The initiative is designed to test sustainable and socially viable housing models. At its centre is the Demo Hub, a pilot project showcasing affordable housing solutions while combining housing innovation with energy efficiency and new approaches to urban development.
"For some of the flats, the physical parameters naturally suggest who should live there – larger homes will go to big families, while accessible ones will be for people with mobility impairments," said Tibor Kiszelyi, project coordinator at the From Street to Home! Association.
"The city has a range of other target groups it wants to support, such as single-parent families and young people leaving state care. We are now trying to piece together this extremely complex set of criteria to work out how tenants should be selected," Kiszelyi said.
Karácsony said the project would not solve Budapest's housing shortage on its own but demonstrated how public authorities and professional organisations could work together to address the problem.
He added that buildings no longer suited to their original purpose offered some of the best opportunities for creating new homes.
Although the 26 rental flats now being completed may not sound like many, Karácsony said they represented significant progress given that no social housing had been built in Budapest over the past 25 years.
