Housing in the Polish People’s Republic: From “Deficit” to “Crisis”

The words “crisis” and “housing” have been closely interconnected in the Polish language since the 1980s, during which the accumulation of impairments affecting the rate of construction and the housing allocation system reached its peak, particularly in the cooperative sector. The present article analyses the evolution of Polish housing in the 20^th century; furthermore, it studies how and when expert literature, as well as the social sciences and forms of media, helped to identify, characterize, and denounce the housing crisis at the end of the People’s Republic of Poland.