The document reports  on a meeting of a focus group which consisted of 15 CUR members coming from different organisations and institutions of the estate and the local government, covering almost all aspects of life on the estate and providing the characterisation of success and failure factors of Havanna housing estate in Budapest.
The report also describes Havanna housing estate, gives short review of its history and characterises its state and status.
Concerning the public interventions the focus group members emphasised the identification of the real demand as the main success factor, while the limited financial resources as the main failure one.

After short introduction and description of Havanna housing estate the report gives information about members of the focus group, goals of this meeting, main questions were discussed, including success and fail factors as well as chances of complex building renewal, then final conclusion is given. Importance of human factor is stressed. Weakness of institutional solutions is basic problem of developing local communities in Hungary.

The main reason behind the activity of the local government is the fact that one of the deputy majors lives in the estate and encourages the municipality all the time to tackle the problems.
The importance of the human factor may also be observed in case of the condominium: if a property manager is able to activate people and able to convince them to invest into the buildings, than the owners became more and more involved in the process. However, the importance of human factor also means that itis not easy to institutionalise the solution, as they heavily depend on people.
The institutional solutions are quite weak in Hungary anyway. There is only a single state programme which supports large scale energy saving renovations indstead of well planned renovation or complete rehabilitation.

Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest
Hungary
http://www.mri.hu
Mr Iván Tosics

01/01/2005

Mr Iván Tosics, Mrs Éva Gerőházi, Mrs Hanna Szemző

research

Urban Policy > Housing > Housing policy

Housing need