The episode of BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents programme ‘Europe’s Most Dangerous Capital’, first broadcast in January 2021, returns to Romania to look at Bucharest’s parlous housing situation. There are two related strands in the report. The first is overcrowding in the blocks of flats built during the Ceaușescu era called ‘camine de nefamilisti’, ‘homes for those without families’. Colloquially known as ‘cutie de chibrituri’, ‘matchboxes’, they were designed to house up to 400 singletons but are now often occupied by families who crowd into the small space.
The programme’s presenter, Simona
Rata, grew up in one in Bucharest, sharing a room with her parents and
grandmother, so she knows whereof she speaks.
Housing numbers of residents not envisaged by the architects puts strain
on what already were basic shared facilities.
Their squalor earning them the nickname ‘Romania’s favelas’, camine de nefamilisti were intended to be temporary and
are in poor condition.
The other significant problem
facing Bucharest is earthquakes, obviously of even greater concern when
buildings were poorly built and are already compromised by previous movements.
The city has Europe’s highest earthquake rate, with an average of three
significant tremors each century. One in
1977 killed and injured a large number of people and destroyed up to 35,000
buildings, leaving huge numbers damaged.
The communist regime claimed at the
time that buildings had been repaired and refurbished, and their residents were
told to return despite clear signs of faults which elsewhere would have had
them condemned. In practice there was
little restoration and buildings remained in a dangerous condition. After Ceaușescu fell people thought the issue
would be dealt with, but it wasn’t.
So people are still living in
buildings damaged in 1977 and by further earthquakes in 1986 and 1990, not as
bad as 1977 but exacerbating the state of the already weakened structures. In the past people had little understanding
of the matter but are now becoming increasingly aware of the effects the
earthquakes have had on the housing stock and the potential consequences of
another major one to these buildings.
In 1996 the 100 buildings deemed
most vulnerable to earthquakes were labelled with a red dot but remained
inhabited and nothing further was done, on cost grounds. Red dots are still put on buildings, the
total now about 350, but estimates of the total in need of urgent attention
range from 2,000 to 3,000. It is going
to take a huge effort to make the buildings of Bucharest safe.
Currently there is a debate about
using public money to strengthen what are now private properties: Romania has
the highest rate of home ownership in the world - 96%. After 1989 there was a rush to sell off state-owned
properties cheaply to avoid having to deal with the massive costs of rectifying
past inactivity. Purchasers were
apparently generally ignorant of the problems, and wouldn’t have had the money
to put them right anyway. There is little
political will to deal with the state of affairs.
In the meantime there is a campaign
to take action to minimise deaths in future earthquakes, such as drawing up
plans to coordinate the emergency response and training rescue dogs. The intention is to act as a model to show
the authorities the way forward. The
poor suffer disproportionately in any catastrophe, and Bucharest has a large
population already living in difficult circumstances: residents of the cutie de
chibrituri will likely suffer more than most.
This is not a programme that will
please the Bucharest Tourist Board, especially the part about pedestrians being
killed by falling masonry, but there were really two programmes here bolted
together, one on Bucharest’s housing crisis, another on the lack of
preparedness for an earthquake and the effect one would have on substandard
buildings. The result left many
unanswered questions, and deeper analysis would have improved it immeasurably.
To begin with, why is there such a
housing crisis forcing so many people to crowd into these tiny rooms, to the
extent that one woman has made her home in what originally was a communal
toilet (she is having to find the money to reimburse fellow residents the taxes
they paid on the facility before she can claim ownership despite having met the
purchase price). Why was she allowed to
buy it, and what are sanitary conditions like with such a concentration of
residents? What about Romanian health
and safety legislation?
Broadening the discussion, how was
the astonishingly high ownership rate achieved and how can so many people
afford to buy when the average wage is so low?
Were people purchasing damaged property really unaware of what they were
inheriting – does nobody in Bucharest have a survey done, or was it the only
option if a rental sector did not exist?
What is the mortgage debt burden, and the repossession rate? Are pressure on accommodation and limited
rental options driving homelessness?
What is it like for those who do
have to rent; what protections, if any, do they enjoy? Why aren’t more houses being built both to ease
pressure on the existing stock and allow unsafe buildings to be demolished? Is government and business corruption a
factor? What, if anything, is the
European Union doing to help? Is the
situation a driver of emigration (again, the toilet flat owner is having to
work abroad to pay the outstanding debt)?
All that is too much to cover in a
thirty-minute radio documentary, of course, but there are issues to explore of
which overcrowding and hazardous buildings are symptoms. I wanted to hear less about training rescue
dogs for a future earthquake, rather about why things had gone so badly wrong
with Bucharest’s housing, and more to the point what can be done to fix them. Hopefully Simona Rata will go back to do
another programme expanding on the subject, and not duck the difficult questions.
