The survey will be open to all Budapest residents over the age of 14 with a permanent address in the capital.

He criticised the 5 billion euro rehabilitation project planned by UAE developer Eagle Hills as a “bad legal arrangement” that prioritised the interests of investors over the public interest.

He said the same developer had carried out a project in Belgrade under a similar arrangement, which would be “remembered as a textbook example of botched urbanistic solutions”.

Budapest needs rustbelt zones where quality homes can be built in order to halt the decline of the city’s population, Karácsony said.

The municipal council agrees with the public developments linked to the project, such as the plan to extend the M1 metro line, he said, adding that the city disagreed with the way the government had selected the developer without a tender, thereby “allowing it to dictate the terms”.

He said that if the municipal council put together a joint development plan for the area in question, “major international property developers would be lining up to work on the project”.

Karácsony said the city council wanted to turn the Rákosrendező neighbourhood into a green residential area with affordable housing and public parks.

In response to a question, he said that in 2019, the new city administration had prepared a development plan for the area that included 8,000-10,000 homes, commercial services and “quality green areas” and enjoyed “broad professional consensus”.

Karácsony: Budapest Resumes Online Poll on Rákosrendező Project, Outpatient Care

The Budapest administration is again conducting an online survey of residents’ views on how the project to redevelop the Rákosrendező district should be carried out and whether district municipalities should continue to run specialist outpatient care facilities, Gergely Karácsony, the city’s mayor, said.

The question was whether the Rákosrendező project should end up like a mini Dubai or a “park city”, the mayor said in a Facebook post.

Questions also remain over whether the Hungarian government should sell the area in an open international procedure or “hide behind an intergovernmental contract”.

He also noted the residents would be asked whether outpatient clinics should be “taken away by the state”, as was the case with hospitals and schools.

Karácsony insisted that waiting lists in the capital had been shortened, while districts were provided with extra money for outpatient specialist care.

More than a 100,000 people participated in last year’s survey dubbed residents’ assembly, when the chief questions concerned traffic on Chain Bridge and a lawsuit the capital launched against the government, he noted.

MTI Photo: Zoltán Máthé

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