Even though currently ca. 6% of the Hungarian population lives in housing cooperatives, there is hardly any public discussion about them. This sheer volume of housing cooperatives is the result of a long historical process, which started in the 1870s. This research follows the history of housing cooperatives in the last 150 years in Hungary, in order to understand the subsequent waves of how citizens and/or the state tried to mitigate the housing crises in different historical periods.

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The historical sociological analysis will shed light on the changing role and relations of the market forces, state policies and bottom-up initiatives of citizens’ groups in addressing housing-related social problems. Through understanding the differences and similarities between different historical periods, and through pointing at the factors behind successful and failed attempts of cooperative housing initiatives, the research will provide a useful analytical frame to look at the contemporary wave of emerging collaborative housing initiatives, which have appeared after the 2008 global crisis both in Hungary, and in other countries around the world.