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 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3

'''FIGURE 23. New workers' housing, Katowice (U/OU)''' (picture)

After World War II the housing shortage in Poland was more severe than in other Eastern European countries, popular discontent with housing shortages was higher, and the effect of cramped living quarters on economic and social life was more pervasive. Even before the war, average urban housing was substandard by Western criteria, and overcrowding and inadequacy of proper sanitary facilities were widespread. The wartime destruction of about 40% of the dwellings on the present territory of Poland and the serious deterioration of the remainder presented the postwar government with a problem of unprecedented magnitude. Initial measures concentrated on the repaid of salvageable buildings. Since the early 1950's the growing rate of new construction by the government and by building cooperatives has improved conditions significantly.

Official claims that housing construction in the late 1960's exceeded population growth appear to be borne out by the declining average number of persons per room, which dropped from 1.75 in 1950 to 1.66 in 1960 and to 1.37 in 1970. Recent data on the average area of living space per person are not available. Most of the new construction has occurred in response to rapid urbanization in the growing industrial centers of Silesia (Figure 23) and in the Warsaw area (Figure 24). New construction is being stressed in the former German territories, although there is had consistently lagged behind the rest of the country and some examples of wartime damage are still evident in many cities in the area. The majority of dwellings in rural areas have improved little over the level prevalent during the prewar period (Figure 25).

Since 1967, the cooperative sector of housing construction has consistently exceeded the state sector in the number of housing units completed; indeed, the state sector has registered a parallel decline. Moreover, this trend has paralleled the growth of entirely private housing construction. Construction of housing units (in thousands) by different sectors since 1965 is shown in the following tabulation:

Since the advent of the Gierek regime both the cooperative and private construction sectors have been further encouraged by such means as exempting all private one-family houses and apartments in cooperative housing from public control in terms of rents and allocations. These policies are but a part of the government's acute awareness that dissatisfaction with lack of housing has not only been endemic throughout postwar period, but it was one of the

'''FIGURE 24. Old and new housing, Warsaw (U/OU)''' (picture)

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070023-3