"Where The Names Have No Streets" - Landscape

Józsefváros, the Eighth district, has never been the easiest part of Budapest to live in. To many, the „Nyócker”, translates as the Gypsy ghetto, a crumbling crime-ridden slum. Historians record its role as the front-line of battle in 1956. These days however, property agents advertise the Palace Quarter, the wedge inside the körút, and the Corvin-Szigony zone just outside. Politicians and sociologists meanwhile, dispute the costs and benefits of ‘gentrification’ and ‘rehabilitation.’

A plaque on the side of the Corvin cinema shows locations of rebel units in the streets behind during the Uprising. Most of the streets however, from Kisfaludy to Szigony, are now gone. Rubble and discarded furniture are strewn across empty lots awaiting the diggers. Only the corner houses with the street names remain.

In a few years, the 22 hectare site will be home to Budapest’s largest and shiniest office location, called the “airport corridor” in the language of the developer Futureal. 1,400 new flats are also planned as well as parks, and a pedestrian shopping street “longer than Váci utca and wider than Liszt Ferenc tér”. A Science Park is included in the last phase when the new concrete finally reaches Szigony utca.

Tenants and owners have been offered a replacement flat or a cash lump-sum. Most have left already. György Alföldi, head of Rév8, the district-owned company in charge of the relocations says the process has been handled as humanely as possible. The owner of a corner-store on Práter is resigned to his fate. “I have to be out by next September. I ran this business for six years, but I can’t compete with the multis anymore, it was time to go anyway.” 

The social upheaval caused by the demolition of 101 buildings and 1,000 flats may be large but not all the locals are shedding tears for their demise. On Szigony utca, a woman says she will miss being able to cross the street to her business in her slippers come rain or snow. “One of my eyes is crying but the other is smiling. There were so many problems with the power, the chimney, the water and so on.” 

The Eighth is Budapest’s mostly densely populated and poorest district. The 100 year-old blocks of middle Józsefvaros, between the körút and Kerepesi graveyard, were built with larger flats with balconies at the front and one- or two-room ‘komfort nélküli’ (‘without basic utilities’) or ‘fél-komfortos’ flats (‘basic utilities only’) in the interior. 

Chain migration from the countryside meant that they often housed several generations of the same family. “Many of the kitchens would have mattresses in them, many of the flats had no toilets inside,” according to Iringó Nemes a lawyer working at the Roma Parliament.

It also has the highest ratio of Roma, estimated at 15-20% of the district’s population of 80-85,000. Gyuri Baglyas’s “Beyond Budapest Sightseeing” company shows people the old courtyards and characters of Józsefváros. “We’re getting more Hungarians interested in finding out about the Eighth. People are curious whether the clichés are true,” he says. 

Challenging one such stereotype, he points out “The large majority of gypsies want to work. Over half of the workers on the Corvin-Szigony project, for example, are Roma.” 

The Roma have always been in demand when labour was required to rebuild the city. The first wave of Roma migrant-workers came in on so-called ‘fekete vonatok’ (‘black trains’) after WWII, and again after 1956. 

Landless Gypsies pushed out of the countryside by rural collectivisation and pulled into the city by the building sites and factories were housed first in makeshift ‘barracks’ beside the factories and then in Józsefváros council flats when these shanty towns were pulled down in the 1970s. After the ‘rendszerváltás’ (‘system-change’) in 1990, the disparity between richer and poorer districts widened, and the Józsefváros slum became entrenched. 

Critics of social segregation blame both market forces and the muncipalities. “No city in Europe has district municipalities with as much autonomy as Budapest,” says János Ladányi, a sociology professor at the Corvinus University who has written extensively about the social and ethnic polarisation of the city. “The rich have gravitated to westernising districts, the poor into slums resembling the Third World. 

Rather than solving the problems of ghettos of poverty, the councils are now breaking them up into smaller pieces.” Nemes tells how people displaced by projects such as Corvin-Szigony often end up in houses bought by the municipality in places like Csepel, Soroksár, Újpest, and villages outside Budapest. “Districts are acting like companies these days, trying to balance budgets but not dealing with the social issues. The poor cost money, so better to push them out to other districts,” says her colleague Erna Csokás.

A product of the distrust of centralisation after the ‘rend-szerváltás’ in 1990, Budapest’s 23 municipalities have a free hand on regeneration in their own patches. Their only significant source of income is real estate. “In Buda they sell the green areas, in outer Pest they sell old industrial zones. In inner Pest, they sell housing and call it rehabilitation. Where there is ‘rehabilitation,’ the Roma disappear from the map,” says Ladányi.

Maté Kocsis, deputy mayor of the VIII district municipality, admits the Eighth district struggles to cope. “We have around 22,000 people here on welfare. That’s more than the entire population of the Fifth district. Rather than pushing them out however, we run programmes to educate people, get them starting businesses or into employment, out of expensive welfare and into paying taxes.”

Protection or demolition

Most of the affected buildings in the Corvin zone were unrenovated since before the Second World War. Baglyas is pragmatic about the demolitions. “Few businesses can profitably renovate and the council has no money. If you save a building from demolition, what good is it if 10 years later that building has to be pulled down as it has become too dangerous to live in. The various interest groups have to try and reach a compromise with municipalities. Confrontation is not always the right way.”

The civic organisation Óvás (‘Care’) has been fighting with the VII district municipality to protect buildings from the wrecking ball in the Jewish quarter of Erzsébetváros. 50-60 buildings have been saved at least temporarily from demolition, but many buildings have also disappeared despite protests.
 
Bálint Kaszics of Óvás argues that financial incentives such as tax-breaks and grants are required to encourage investors to renovate. “Unfortunately for Józsefváros, it has always been mostly poor. There are more unrenovated buildings there and less historic ones. There are also less Roma lawyers and intellectuals around to stand up for the heritage of the district than in the Seventh.” 

Kocsis stresses that his municipality’s strategy is protection not demolition. “We try to protect the character of our district, unlike in Ferencváros where hundreds of buildings were torn down. People forget that Corvin-Szigony is only a small part of the district. The Orczy park make-over has just finished. We are building a new hospital in Bacso Béla utca and have secured EU funding to restore 40 facades in the Palace Quarter. There are 11 universities there, we want to create a ‘Latin quarter’ ambiance.” 

Óvás are not convinced by the Corvin project. “At least the scale of the new buildings in Ferencváros was in keeping with the district” says Kaszics. There are fears that the Corvin concept won’t integrate with the surrounding neighbourhood, becoming instead an island of wealth within a ghetto of poverty. 

The top of the project borders onto the Magdolna quarter, one of the poorest areas of the entire city. Baglyas maintains however that Józsefváros has always had a split personality. “The middle and outer Eighth originally housed workshops and artisans who worked for those living in the palace quarter. With the Corvin project, rich and poor will again live side by side. Hopefully there will be a spillover effect and a win-win situation.” 

Back on Szigony utca, the last street down for demolition, a man ruefully looks up at his flat. “This will be the last house to be pulled down. Our building needed renovation thirty years ago, now it’s too late. The corridors and staircases are falling apart. They keep telling me I’ll be moving next year but they told me that last year and the year before. I don’t know if I should put any more money into fixing my flat. I just want to leave now.”

Source: Budapest Sun