In a context of unprecedented urbanization, nineteenth-century European cities faced the ‘housing question’, i.e. precarious housing standards and affordability problems. While existing research has well described these historical housing problems in single-city studies or in national urbanization histories, to our knowledge, there are hardly any multi-country neighborhood-level comparisons across many cities. This article first draws on a new data collection containing extensive statistical surveys of 352 cities’ housing conditions across their 4,376 neighborhoods around the median year 1906 in 24 countries, and combines this data with newly georeferenced historical maps. We show that the historical housing question was characterized by extremely high densities, private tenancy, rents and segregation levels, particularly for large and poor households in small, substandard and overcrowded flats in larger, densely built neighborhoods, particularly in larger northern and eastern European cities. Our snapshot comparison with current housing conditions additionally shows that despite lower densities and rent segregation as well as higher quality and homeownership, the rental burden and building-structure inequality across neighborhoods has increased, suggesting a housing question comeback, in a different guise.
Kohl et al. (Tue,) studied this question.