A yet another book, which has come into my hands belatedly, oddly enough the read nearly ideally coincided with the tenth anniversary of the work being first published. Basically, I once had a chance to meet him in person and since then am fond of Filip Springer’s essays, despite not being truly convinced by his leftist tilt. Recently he provoked an uproar by claiming for climate-related reasons, building detached houses should be gradually prohibited. Extreme views and ideas activate defiance and help the pendulum swing into the other extreme.
From today’s perspective, the book, dealing with housing pathologies in Poland, is a sort of outdated. It begins with a bleak picture of pre-WW2 Warsaw where growing number of residents was not matched by a rising number of flats caused a huge overcrowding in dwellings occupied by a working class. For 90% of families living in the capital of Poland having a housing unit (unit as a separate room, nor a separate flat) for the entire family (i.e. with no roommates) only was a luxury.
The author for some reason omits 45 years of communism, when the number of new dwelling relatively well caught up with rising population of Poland and standards of living improved (in spite of all the drawbacks of the bygone system). The author arranged his book as a series of stories and interviews, in which he attempts to paint an accurate picture of reality, without evaluating it or pointing what is right and what is wrong. But if you read carefully between the lines, you get several messages, e.g. that home ownership is overrated or mortgages are evil and will enslave you.
The book was written when the memory of property boom of 2006-2008, accompanied by reckless mortgage lending in CHF was relatively fresh. Also bankruptcies of developers were much more frequent a decade ago than they are now. But on the other hand, the book was written soon past the only property market serious correction, when prices between 2008 and 2012 fell by 25% in nominal terms.
For no apparent reason Mr Springer fails to crack down on pathologies of modern housing estates, such as non-functional layouts, tiny distances between buildings, rows of terraced houses built in the middle of nowhere and many other.
The accursed ownership, as his interlocutors point out, gives a sense of security. To make a house and home you need to own it. Such approach has been driven by decades of private ownership being eradicated by communists and then by years of landlords’ primacy over tenants. The properly rental market has also evolved over the last decade. With rising supply of dwellings for rent (flat purchased for investment purposes when bank deposits fetched a mediocre return), bargaining power of landlords waned and many of them began treat tenants as equal counterparties. A stride has been made, yet a flat rented from a private landlord still does not offer stability and its affordability remains as poor as it was a decade ago.
Unlike the author, I believe properties should be subject to free-market rules, but I would expect the government to help supply and demand meet where prices are affordable. Sadly, recent governments mostly boosted demand by subsidising mortgage loans, instead of taking steps towards increasing supply of available dwellings. I refer here not only to building council flats or encouraging property developers to pursue new projects. It is also about levying taxes on uninhabited properties, to discourage those with surpluses of money from speculative purchases.
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