Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony and his team especially favored single homeless people and childless couples when it was necessary to distribute the capital’s rental apartments, according to Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet.
In the previous cycle, new tenants moved into 299 rental apartments in the capital, but families with minor children could move into not much more than half of that.
The paper writes that it is telling that a third of the apartments were occupied by single homeless people. The official figures from the capital show that the mayor only talks about the housing problems of young people and families, but has done nothing about it in the last five years. The Budapest municipality recommended the failed Capital Housing Agency to non-disadvantaged young people, while only 25 apartments out of the 140,000 available rental apartments on the market were included in the program, i.e., it did not give young people a solution.
“Currently, the right to lease apartments owned by the capital city can basically be obtained through housing tenders and on a fair basis,” the capital city municipality stated to Magyar Nemzet. It is known that Mayor Gergely Karácsony often talks about the housing crisis for young people, so in 2024, as one of the tools to solve the housing crisis, the Capital Housing Agency was established, whose task would be to provide assistance to those people with ties to Budapest who pay market-based rents due to their income situation.
The real help would be the construction of rental apartments and the release of existing ones. Currently, the capital city has 1,238 rental apartments, of which 229 are currently unoccupied and 91 of these are in retirement homes. Of the empty apartments, 30 properties are currently ready to move into, of which 17 are apartments in retirement homes. Of the empty apartments, 199 are to be restored, of which 74 are retirement home apartments.
Responding to Magyar Nemzet, the Budapest government explained that during the 2019-2024 cycle, the capital city saw it as its task to help target groups in a disadvantaged position in terms of housing, such as the homeless, parents raising several small children, and parents without stable housing, to help them find housing on the basis of social responsibility and solidarity.
However, according to the numbers, out of the 299 apartments rented out, 189 apartments were rented out to people who were living in a homeless situation or had moved out of their temporary family home. This is more than half of the apartments for rent.
What is even more striking: Out of the 189 rented apartments, single tenants moved into 101, while two people could move into 58 of the apartments. In all of those cases, only five minor children were given housing.
Among the families with several children, families of three moved into nine apartments, families of four moved into 13 apartments with a total of 27 minors, families of five moved into five apartments with 16 children, and one apartment was rented out to a family with four children. Two families of seven also found a home.
In addition to the above, 51 retirement homes were rented out. What is interesting is that 10 service rentals are also on the list, i.e., an employee of a town hall or capital company could get housing in this way. In addition, there are 27 rented properties designated by the capital as “other” rental properties, i.e., they did not want to provide detailed information about these rental properties.
Based on this, it can be concluded that the capital favored homeless people living alone or couples without children. So, during the five-year cycle, homeless people without children moved into half of the rented apartments.
It is no wonder that the housing crisis for young people has not been mitigated. The capital also announced that a significant part of the tenants do not have and did not have the opportunity to maintain the condition of their apartment or maintain their rental property, therefore tenders are issued for maintenance within the apartment every year.
