When the housing shortage was still called the workers’ housing problem

In the second half of the 19th century, people’s daily lives changed rapidly. ‘The new is coming’: that is the title of a standard work on the upheavals of that time. The triumph of the railroad was new and formative.

But industrialization also had an influence. Steam power and electrical energy made it possible to locate and operate factories even where there was no water power, on which early industrial production still depended.

This surge in industrialization caused cities to grow. And growth accelerated, as the Basel figures show: it took seventy years for the first doubling of the population by the mid-19th century, for the second thirty, and for the third doubling it took only the last two decades of the 19th century. 19th century.

The city of Zurich grew by 9,400 inhabitants annually between 1893 and 1897, the years in which the State Museum was built. This corresponds to 7.3 percent and is six times more than the current growth of the city. In Switzerland as a whole, the urban population increased sixfold between 1850 and 1910. In no other census period was urbanization as strong as between 1888 and 1900.

Immigration to the cities – initially mainly from rural areas of Switzerland, later also from abroad – overwhelmed the construction sector and overloaded the housing market. There wasn’t enough affordable housing for all the people who came to the city for work. Mainly profitable representative, commercial and factory buildings were built, but also villas and better residential buildings.

The health records of the city of Basel from 1891 state: “We experience that in certain cities there is a surplus of better housing and at the same time an extreme shortage of housing for so-called little ones. Construction speculation is used to build houses that are not intended for permanent rental, but for sale.” And the city council of Zurich stated in its annual report for 1897 that there were only 7,785 rental apartments for 25,000 low-income households at a price affordable to them.

In short, there was a lack of housing for the workers and their families. There was a housing shortage not only in the big cities, but also in small towns such as Arbon, which was mainly due to rapidly growing companies at the time. Pickles And Heine grew rapidly, or in rural areas such as the lower Reuss Valley in the canton of Uri, which became a well-developed and therefore interesting location for industry after the opening of the Gotthard railway.

And the same thing happened everywhere: the existing rental homes and apartments were subdivided, expanded and rented out down to the last corner, from the basement to the roof. And the prices for the cramped, dark and poorly ventilated apartments were terrible. Official surveys show that rents for such apartments, converted per cubic meter, are higher than the prices of privileged large apartments. The smallest apartments were therefore the most expensive.

To pay the high rent, many people house subtenants in separate parts of the apartment. Or they housed so-called sleepers, to whom they rented a bed in their own room, sometimes in eight-hour shifts. In Zurich, subtenants and sleepers sometimes made up more than 15 percent of the population. And time and time again, homeless families in Zurich and Bern were forced to camp in barns, stables, attics and under bridges.

These conditions increasingly became the subject of public debate – both in Switzerland and in other countries, where the same picture emerged in many cities. In 1872, Friedrich Engels devoted a series of articles to the housing problem. In the same year, a committee of the Social Democratic Workers’ Association in Basel called for a people’s assembly “to discuss the housing shortage” on. Attempts were made everywhere to investigate the situation further.

From 1889, the cities of Basel, Lausanne, Bern, Zurich and Lucerne introduced so-called “Ask for an apartment” Through. These studies, which were carried out with great difficulty, aimed to assess living conditions according to strict scientific criteria. Their results showed the extent of the housing shortage for the first time and ultimately put the issue on the political agenda under the title “The housing problem of employees”.

Even before the investigation in Zurich was completed, the city council had stated in its annual report for 1894: “As can be concluded from numerous observations on the ground, the workers’ housing problem has reached a stage that is likely to arouse public attention.” The city council was concerned about whether the “overpopulation” of the apartments, “which has already had the worst sanitary, moral and social consequences and will have to do so more and more if the evil that threatens to become chronic is not comprehensively and energetically combated.”.

According to the city government, conditions would not improve, but rather worsen, “if housing production is left completely to itself, that is, to speculation, if the community, non-profit organizations and employers do not intervene to regulate housing production. The Zurich City Council decided “a committee of its members” to use, “with orders to subject the issue of workers’ housing to a thorough investigation”.

However, in the following years there were no concrete results. Advising on various applications “long-term due to various circumstances”, as the Zurich City Council noted. One reason was an economic downturn, which temporarily slowed the city’s growth.

But the political situation may also have played a role. Before the turn of the century, workers still had little political weight. From 1900 onwards, however, the Social Democrats were the strongest party in the Zurich city parliament. In the following years, the first urban residential development project was created (Limmat residential colony, today the Limmat I settlement), which was subsequently approved in a referendum in 1907.

In Basel, the Government Council and the Grand Council clearly rejected the idea of ​​transferring the construction of cheap rental apartments to the state in 1896. It was not until April 1919 and September 1921 that the first projects for the construction of apartments by the state were established. Elsewhere, such as in Arbon, where voters approved a contribution to the local stock-building association in 1907, the public sector participated in housing projects promoted by private individuals.

Or industrialists themselves created living space for their workers, like Rieter in Winterthur. Although individual housing cooperatives emerged as early as the mid-19th century, they generally had a short lifespan. Only after the First World War did they find a favorable political and financial climate.

The poor living conditions in the second half of the 19th century played an important role in the hardening of the social climate of the time. This was particularly pointed out by Bruno Fritzsche, the professor at the Research Center for Social and Economic History of the University of Zurich, who died in 2009 and who carried out the work with a small team. «Historical structural atlas of Switzerland. The Rise of Modern Switzerland » had written.

The housing shortage, together with the wage issue, was not only one of the main reasons for organized strikes, but also for a number of conflicts. “which broke out without a plausible and concrete claim, because of ‘trivialities’ and ‘trivia’”. Examples of such conflicts are the Cage Tower Uprising of 1893 in Bern, the Italian uprising in Zurich of 1896 or the Arbon Uprising of 1902. According to Fritzsche, the issue of workers’ housing was much more important in the rise of workers’ organizations. of class consciousness and ultimately of class struggle. Working Conditions.