Government responses to housing challenges – Foreign currency loans vs. CSOK and Home Start Programme

Abstract

In recent decades, the housing crisis has been present in Hungary to varying extent. The paper aims to prove that passive governmental measures (allowing the spread of foreign currency lending) are far from achieving the same results in the field of housing as active and comprehensive packages of governmental measures (CSOK, Otthon Start Program), which have demographic goals in addition to housing policy. Besides classic literature sources, the paper also relies on law, relevant KINCS researches, as well as various banking/real estate market reports and analyses. The experience arising from foreign currency lending and the change in family and housing policy after 2010 shows that the housing crisis can only be managed by active measures, while passive measures can only achieve results for a short period of time, with significant systemic risks, which in turn can very easily be reversed by an economic crisis or other force majeure event, thus catalyzing the housing crisis.