Riga's housing crisis lasted more than a century
Historian Kārlis Sils, writing for Latvian Radio 3's "Did You Know?" series, explains that Riga's housing crisis, whose scale a 1924 city statistics survey revealed, disappeared completely only in the past two decades.
Riga's housing crisis, which affected residents in the years after the First World War, lasted longer than in most of Europe and disappeared completely only within the last twenty years. That is the account of historian and lsm.lv author Kārlis Sils, written for the "Did You Know?" series on Latvian Radio 3, in which cultural researchers, historians and other experts explain various terms and unusual ideas.
A survey reveals the scale
A public debate between right-wing and left-wing political forces over the housing crisis had begun in the Latvian press in the summer of 1919, but its scale could be measured only in 1924. That year the Riga City Statistical Office carried out the first comprehensive study of residents' housing. It showed that 111,471 people, or 37% of city dwellers, lived in small and overcrowded flats with more than two people per room. Many of these homes were unsanitary, and the buildings had neither electricity nor running water. The poorest residents suffered most, mostly in Grīziņkalns and the Latgale Suburb.
The commission and its work
The following year, the Riga city council backed the creation of a Housing Crisis Control Commission. It included influential politicians, architects and urban planners. Its main tools were loans for small private rental buildings and the construction of municipal rental houses. The loans helped build much of the Teika neighbourhood, and municipal rental buildings still stand on Liepājas, Ropažu and Jāņa Asara streets, among others.
The commission's plans were hindered by the economic crisis of the early 1930s and a change of power in Riga after the 1931 elections, when opponents of municipal rental housing took control. By early 1931 the situation had worsened: 146,997 residents, or 39%, lived in small and overcrowded flats.
A lasting problem
In interwar debates, each side explained the crisis from its own ideological standpoint. It was rarely mentioned that most large European cities, which had industrialised rapidly in the 19th century, were in a similar position. Most of Europe resolved the crisis in the 1960s, but in Riga it continued.
After the coup of 15 May 1934, the city board declared the crisis solved, which was not true. Only one new rental building went up before the Soviet occupation: at the corner of Brīvības and Matīsa streets, by the Vidzeme Market. In Soviet times communal flats were used, and later new flats were allocated primarily to migrants from the Soviet Union. As late as the end of the 1980s, conditions in Grīziņkalns and the Latgale Suburb were as grim as at the end of the 19th century.
