This article examines how the single-family house has remained central to rural housing in Hungary since 1941. It explores how successive regimes used homeownership to influence demographic strategies, social norms, and spatial organisation. Focusing on three key periods – an interwar housing programme (ONCSA), informal socialist-era self-building, and post-2015 familialist policies (CSOK) – it argues that each reflects a persistent logic of governing with or despite the construction of the family house. Although differing in political form, the two state-led programmes share core assumptions: social support is selective, reproduction is incentivised, and moral conduct is spatially inscribed. Meanwhile, during socialism, rural families sustained the single-family house through informal building practices, despite official ambivalence and limited institutional support, revealing how housing dispositions persisted independently of state ideology and shaped rural spatial realities. The article argues that Hungary’s postliberal regime has not broken with earlier approaches but has intensified long-standing traditions of familialism and conditional support. Through architecture and ownership, housing policy has consistently privileged those deemed demographically valuable, whether Christian peasant families in the 1940s or married, upper-middle-class couples today. These continuities have produced a stratified social order based on reproductive loyalty and spatial containment.
Zöller, E. C. (2025). The Single-Family House in Hungary Since 1941: How Pronatalism and Familialism Shaped Rural Housing. In Benkő, M. (Ed.). Facing Post-Socialist Urban Heritage. DOCONF2025 Proceedings. Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Urban Planning and Design, pp. 342–353.