the housing problem in communist Poland was one of the main manifestations of poverty, understood as permanent deprivation and failure to meet basic needs. The shortage of housing, its poor quality, and over-crowding implied that part of the Polish population lived in conditions far from decent standards. Substandard housing, which often dated back to the interwar period, was an inseparable part of this phenomenon. due to their terrible technical conditions, makeshift housing spaces were referred to as “poor houses,” and entire clusters of them were called “poor housing estates.” The post-war, exceptionally acute housing shortage illustrated the weaknesses of the centralized socialist economy, in which scarcity affected not only living conditions but also access to services and urban infrastructure.in this article, the housing issue will be examined in the context of the groundbreaking political and social events that occurred in People’s Poland. in which case, reference is here made as touching crises of power and social unrest that historians have most often presented in a political and martyrdom context during the period under study. Several studies have also been published analysing these events from a socio-economic perspective (Grala, 2005; Bałtowski, 2009; Dworaczek and Głowiński, 2021). However, these publications are usually synthetic in nature and do not devote sufficient attention to the impact of socio-economic crises in communist Poland on the functioning of the housing system (Jarosz, 2010). In response to this research gap, the author of this article has decided to examine, in more detail, their impact on the state’s housing policy in the years 1956–1989.