Green city
For more articles on similar topics, see the 04/2024 issue of A&B - GREEN CITY,
from which we publish the article below. Download free e-issues of A&B and read more.
"Such a topic that makes my stomach hurt at the mere mention." This is one of the comments under my post. The topic I brought up turned out to be important not only for me, generationally we share a memory that is not necessarily pleasant, sometimes even repressed, for many traumatic.
I recently read "Luka" by Jagoda Ratajczak. I found the subtitle of this book ("How Shame and Anxiety Hole Our Tongue") fitting not only for the topic the author deals with. Perhaps the combination of the beautiful cover (two chairs with a gap between them) and my emotions, memories shifted the topic to a field related to me - architecture. "In fact, slightly altered this subtitle could do as a headline for a text about apartments". - I wrote on my Instagram. At the time, I didn't know that I had just opened a discussion and an avalanche of messages awaited me. In a survey I created on the topic of housing shame, 2,500 people participated. 33 percent of those responding confirmed that they were ashamed of their apartment when they were a kid. Twenty-five percent were ashamed of it at some time (for example, until they moved).
My dream was a house without a fungus
© Magdalena Milert
In the "Dictionary of the Polish Language" of 1967, "shame" is defined as "an unpleasant, humiliating feeling, caused by awareness of wrong, bad, disgraceful conduct (one's own or whose), wrong words, awareness of one's own or whose shortcomings, mistakes, etc." In modern dictionaries we can already find definitions that specify the types of shame: to whom or what they refer, what they are the result of, it is often linked to morality or judgment. Shame is a social emotion. It is interactional in nature - it occurs in contact with another person and is associated with fear of being judged. "The sense of shame is not only an issue related to self-esteem, self-worth, it is first and foremost the ability to look at oneself - an emotional impression that masters us when we think about ourselves." Returning to the realities of political transition and the nostalgically remembered 1990s, it turns out that our apartments were not so great after all. The result of inadequate or humiliating living conditions, including inadequate housing, was often shame. Millenials who have already moved out of their family homes react differently to the memory of where they lived during their childhood years. In the aforementioned survey, 42 percent responded that they were not ashamed of where and how they lived. Those people who were ashamed, however, do not mention small things such as the color of the walls. They mention dampness, mold, fungus, lack of bathrooms, heating, overcrowding, and lack of privacy. While the statistics of the survey conducted on Instagram can be taken as an inadequate study, the CSO's data is unassailable and speaks volumes. In 1989, 72 percent of apartments were equipped with a bathroom, and those with access to running water were 85 percent. Central heating was installed in 62 percent of homes. In 2005, one in two Polish children lived in conditions of poverty or social exclusion. These children constituted a collective 20 percent more numerous in Poland than in the European Union on average. "In 2005, Poland, along with Latvia and Lithuania, was the country with the highest share of children and adolescents living in very poor housing conditions." The state of conditions can be assessed through the level of housing deprivation, or very poor housing, which consists of insufficient housing size and poor technical condition of the premises. Deep housing deprivation was experienced by one in three children in Poland, compared to one in nine children across the Union. By 2020, 7.9 percent of Poland's population already lived in such conditions.
My dream was a house without a fungus
© Magdalena Milert
Kasia (names have been changed) shares her feelings with me: "Something soured me when I saw this topic. I was surprised that something so intimate was public and widespread - I didn't know anyone who also felt this way, and I always thought of it as my embarrassing, intimate issue. As a child I suffered from not being able to invite my friends, unpleasant especially on my birthday. Today I am ashamed to invite a boy home to introduce him to my parents." She thanks me for the post and for making me realize that she is not so special in this housing shame.
I talk to Anna, who tells me she's happy to answer about how she lived, because "she's already at an age where she's not ashamed of it." "We lived in an old tenement, where our apartment was 20 square meters, and there were four of us. In the beginning there was a shared toilet for the whole cage, we washed in a bowl. Later my dad made a bathroom. Due to the fact that it was a tenement that the owner had somewhere, there was no heating, each apartment had to manage. We had such an old tin stove, Dad made the apartment heating from it. We used to go to my grandmother in the countryside for the weekend, when we returned home on Sunday in winter it was 2, 3 degrees in the apartment, sometimes zero. Later we expanded the apartment by less than 20 meters more, because the neighbor moved out. It was already better, but still in the old less than 20 meters there was a bathroom, a kitchen, a so-called "americana" with a table, which was moved away for sleeping. Nevertheless, I remember most fondly the mornings when I slept on this americana, and my mother cooked, fired up the stove, I woke up and it was warm. The other room had everything, the living room, the bedroom, the studio. Everything. There was my parents' bed, a wall unit like in every house back then, lots of stuff. Colleagues invited me to stay with them, they had their own rooms, dishwashers, aquarium and other things that were cool for me at the time. And we had an old stove, a barely made bathroom, a dingy staircase and ourselves."
Gosia recalls: "As a child, I received a gift from a classmate (Christmas drawing, maybe 5th grade of elementary school) and in the package I had bath balls... and I bathed in a bowl. I was terribly sorry at the time." In another message, I read, "A bathroom with falling off the staining and other wonders like fungus and pipes on top was also always a source of shame for me."
Monica describes her memories of living in an apartment building: "I was ashamed of where I lived. Because of my grandparents' illnesses, unemployment and poverty, the apartment hadn't seen renovation since early communist Poland. The shame was ingrained in me by my parents, not inviting anyone. A lot of people in Poland suffer from a lack of "own corner" due to the small size. In our case it was the opposite, a large apartment in a pre-war tenement. In this case, the problem was the cost of renovation. A bathroom with fungus, old windows, crumbling walls. Even as an adult, I helped my parents with the renovation and learned not to be ashamed, even when something is not perfect. With my parents, the shame remained...".
My dream was a house without fungus
© Magdalena Milert
However, not everyone worked through it like Monika and Ania, who stresses that she is grateful for how her dad tried, how he tried to make their lives more comfortable. Martha recalls that she is still traumatized by the lack of living space and peace of mind. "I rent another apartment, and my biggest dream is a piece of my own land under my feet," she says. - she recalls. She lived in a pre-war apartment building, which first housed her grandmother's family (her great-grandfather with his grandmother and three children, and her great-grandmother), and then the children with their families and the next generation. "In forty-something meters, without a bathroom. Toilet fortunately private, but outside the apartment, unheated. I lived there with my grandmother, grandfather, brother and parents. Two rooms heated with coal, including one transitional room. No private hallway. The 1990s - my mother lived there until three years ago - taking care of my dying grandfather." Sylvia writes that she was very ashamed: "We didn't have a bathroom or toilet at home until I was in my twenties. Today, in adulthood, I have my own apartment, but I also have a block against inviting people into my home."
Many people emphasize that the perception of their apartment changed when they started school. One observer comments: "Until I went to school, it was still as good as it was, because everyone was poor." She was ashamed of not having her own room, so she rarely invited peers over. Hiding it was natural. Kaja says that as a child she lived with "four siblings at her grandparents' house, in one room. Zero privacy, I felt stupid to invite my friends over, because there was no way. And as a kid I felt different, I had the bookcase to myself, and my friends had the whole room. Then we moved out to a house that was unfinished for many years. We had curtains instead of doors in the bathroom. This shame somehow sat in me. And the discomfort of having nothing done in that house to suit you and your needs. Seemingly these were not terrible things, but honestly this feeling of being poor somehow affects a person, even after so many years. Now I live in the family home, as a man in his early 30s (I'm still collecting for a contribution), the house already looks better. But all the time there is a kind of shame sitting in me - and after all, it should not be that I am inferior because I am poorer, no? And since it's neat, but it's not the prettiest, how will someone judge this house and me based on it, it's their problem, not mine? All the time it somehow sits in me:)".
Overpopulation rate by age, gender and poverty status - total population, Eurostat 2022 Leaflet data | Administrative boundaries
©EuroGeographics ©UN-FAO ©Turkstat, Cartography: Eurostat - GISCO, 2019
In Poland, the rate of housing improvement was one of the highest among EU countries between 2005 and 2010. The percentage of dwellings without access to basic utilities declined then. In 1989, Poland's housing stock stood at 10.9 million apartments, with 3.42 people per apartment. In 2022, the ratio dropped to 2.42. In terms of overcrowding, a variable that is the starting point for assessing severe housing deprivation, however, Poland is still in the infamous lead in Europe, with almost 36 percent of housing units in 2022 (the EU average is 16.8 percent). A dwelling is considered overcrowded if a household does not have at least: one living room - a living room, one bedroom per couple, one room for each person over 18. years of age, one room for two persons of the same sex aged 12-17, one room for each person aged 12-17, one room for each two children under the age of 12. This means that each bachelor's apartment by European standards is overcrowded, as there is no separate bedroom available in addition to the living room. By 2008, more than half of Poles lived in overcrowded houses and apartments. I don't hear much about overcrowding as the only problem in my conversations; if anything, it's one of several problems, often remembered even as "something interesting." This is probably because, as the data shows, we continue to live quite cramped and see it as the norm. One interviewee even comments that, from her observations, all the larger families she knows "who have crowded into apartments are cool and I even envy them these bonds between siblings :(". I also hear interesting voices in the comments: "Totally not ashamed, despite the fact that at the apogee for a couple of years, when my parents were waiting for an apartment (the merry 80s), we lived seven people in three rooms with a kitchen. Plus a big German shepherd"; "Warsaw, communist Poland. We lived with my grandparents and my aunt. It was fun, although later, as a teenager, I went crazy with happiness, having my own room. I also think that people should multiply as they have housing conditions, because now I see that as a child I missed out on a lot (I didn't meet my friends at home, because there was seriously nowhere)." So yet we see the problem, we see that something is wrong. From another statement: "I, on the whole, wasn't ashamed, although we were cramped, five people on 50 sq. m. I was not ashamed. We lived modestly, but I remember that in the 1990s everyone around me lived the same way, so I didn't feel it as a problem. On the other hand, as an adult, however, I wanted better. First of all, I wanted a bedroom for me and my husband, my parents always slept in a large room."
Poor living conditions can serve as a mechanism for social stratification, affecting the well-being of children and causing intergenerational transmission of social inequality. A study of the impact of housing overcrowding in Chile showed that an increase in household overcrowding levels due to a reduction in the number of available bedrooms was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms. At the same time, a decrease in household overcrowding is not associated with changes in depressive symptoms. Overcrowding can lead to emotional problems, developmental delay and bedwetting, poorer mental adjustment in children; social tension, irritability and disrupted social relationships. These findings suggest a strong relationship between housing overcrowding and mental health, and underscore the importance of preventive policies to address housing affordability. Overcrowding in childhood increases the likelihood of poor self-rated health in adulthood. There is a strong link between overcrowding and school performance. Findings showed that children who grew up in a home with at least two children in the bedroom were significantly more likely to drop out of school. More than 60 percent of children living in overcrowded conditions in the UK at age fifteen repeated grades in elementary or middle school. The link between educational achievement and housing conditions (especially overcrowding) can only be partially explained by other variables, such as differences in income and number of children. Researchers from France came to similar conclusions; they showed that there is a strong relationship between housing conditions and educational failure, and it is likely to be causal. Children from large families do much worse than children from small families and this is mainly due to the fact that they live in more overcrowded homes.
annual overcrowding rate
© Magdalena Milert
According to the Central Statistical Office (2021), in 2020 the average usable area of an apartment in Poland was 74.5 sq. m, which is more than 15 sq. m more than at the beginning of the transition period. In per capita terms, the size was only 17.5 m² in 1990 (CSO, 1991), 31.1 m² in 2022.
The conversation in the comments shifted from memories to the current state. "I was very ashamed. I didn't have my own room and there was no bathroom. Drama. Why people in such conditions decide to start a family, I will never understand." One person comments: "One might think that the worst is behind us, but I live in Krakow and quite a few people on the estate decided to have 2-3 children, living in tiny apartments. Now these children go to schools and there is not even a place to put a desk. About inviting friends, I won't even mention it." There are also comments that say outright that they are basically replicating the pattern of years ago. "4 people on 38 m². Am I ashamed? What do I have to be ashamed of? I didn't get an apartment from my family. I pay a huge loan, I have to earn everything myself. And it's not me who made this world this way. My children lived in one room for years. Was it difficult for them? It used to be. But they have a capital bond. I miss my own bedroom, but... I like to lounge in bed on Saturdays and watch my husband make coffee in the kitchenette across the room."
Based on the data, the extent of poverty and social exclusion among children, as well as material and housing deprivation, has decreased significantly in Poland during the period of its membership in the European Union. From a country with the greatest extent of poverty among children, we have moved to a group of countries that rank close to the EU average. These changes took place primarily between 2005 and 2008, when national income grew rapidly, unemployment fell and there was mass emigration, which contributed significantly to the budgets of families remaining in the country. "After 2008, progress in combating poverty and social exclusion among children was much less. Housing conditions also improved, although not in all aspects.
So what will modern children remember from their childhood? Will they be ashamed of themselves? If so, of what? The sociological and psychosocial aspect of shame emerges when a child violates rules, norms, including moral norms related to the social relationship, or perceives that they have been violated. At the moment of transition from the home world to school, it crosses the boundaries of social microsystems and involves the acquisition of new social and cognitive competencies. We are certainly further along today in writing stories about housing conditions. The memory of the lack of a bathroom, heating or even a sink in the bathroom seems to blur. In terms of subjective assessments of these conditions, Poles are among the greatest optimists in Europe. Socially, we still remember the days of the perpetual shortage of goods in the People's Republic of Poland and packages from the US, which were a pill of Western goodness. The older generation instilled in us not to be picky, after all, it wasn't that long ago that things were much worse. The devastation of the war, and later the forcible industrialization and the underestimation of the role of the housing sector by the communist authorities, led to an increase in housing problems. The state that housing was in at the time of the political changes in 1989 was deplorable. Although the 1990s brought the possibility of cheap housing, they were also associated with a number of problems: a regression in construction, a sharp increase in construction costs, a growing housing shortage, accelerating decapitalization of the stock, or a deregulation of the country's entire housing system. The government was faced with the task of reforming the housing area, and privatization provided an opportunity to change the quality of life for only a select group of people. It was not possible for everyone to purchase an apartment. We lived and continue to live as our budget or credit allowed us. The rent gap is now as high as 70 percent. This means that this is how many people cannot afford a loan, while not qualifying for public housing. Housing built more than a century ago accounts for about 6.9 percent of the total stock in our country, and most of these old apartments are suitable for major renovation, while the buildings are extremely energy inefficient. Most of the existing housing meets current standards of civilization, but especially in the east of the country, a significant percentage of apartments without water supply, a toilet or central heating is visible. So let's hope there are as few stomachaches as possible when someone brings up the subject of childhood housing twenty years from now.
Magdalena Milert
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