The tenant assignment you're writing about has been caused by three main factors, all directly related to the recently finished war. First and foremost, the sheer scale of the damage incurred during the war, especially the cities like Warsaw that had almost 70% of its buildings destroyed in the German offensive of 1939, Warsaw Uprising, liquidation of ghetto and combat in 1944/1945 (what endangered its status as a state capital) or cities formerly belonging to Germans in Lower Silesia and Pomerania (later known as the Recovered Territories), where the infrastructure damage rate could have reached 90%. This alone caused immense shortage of the residential buildings for people who survived the war. Furthermore, in the wake of the Second World War, the borders of Poland changed heavily, and while the country received aforementioned territories and large part of former Eastern Prussia, it also lost territories that are now parts of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. These territorial shifts necessitated significant migrations that additionally exacerbated the problem given that 'Recovered Territories' saw very heavy damage, especially in urban areas. Last, but not least, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw intense reconstruction effort that included not only the rebuilding of pre-war infrastructure, but also expansion of industry. This bolstered urbanization rate what, although beneficial to the gradual development of economy, did not make life of the newcomers any easier, as the rate new residential buildings being erected was much lower than the influx of people from small towns and villages, number of marriages and general post-war population boom. It should be noted that the prevalence of the co-called 'communal flats' (rus. коммунальные квартиры) in USSR well into 1960s was also largely caused by the rapid industrialization rate that was not matched by relatively slow rate of the construction of residential building. This situation begun to change only after wide adoption of a simple multi-story apartment blocks, quickly nicknamed 'khrushchevkas' in Russian-speaking areas.

To alleviate these problems in Poland, new Polish authorities introduced the State Residential Administration Decree of on 21st December 1945 that was effectively nationalizing residential buildings what allowed the state officials (usually Municipal of Community National Council, depending of the area) to allocate people looking for a living space to flats and houses that could have accommodated them without the owner's consent. Initially, the decree was limited to the seven cities of post-war Poland, i.e. Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Poznań, Gdańsk, Katowice and Lublin, but in 1951 it has been extended to the entire territory of Poland.

The assignments were usually limited to large flats and houses, sporting 5 or more rooms, but in the areas where accommodation was more problematic, it could have been applied to smaller ones. Generally, such flats were divided so that a single family could have been assigned to a single room or two, depending on the space they could have used as their own (there were norms requiring the minimal space available per adult person, e.g. 10 or 15 square meters) with other facilities being shared by all the residents. In case of townhouses, usually being privately owned before the war, part of them were nationalized (starting with these whose owners or their descendants could have not been been found, mostly having perished during the war, what was quite commonly the case among buildings owned by Polish Jews who were killed along with entire families in the Holocaust). Those townhouses that remained in private hands could have tenants allocated, and their rent has been paid by the state, although the nominal rate was generally well below the profitability margin, leading to slow dilapidation of the buildings or forcing the owners to sell or give away their property. In some cases, this was, indeed a way to punish people who opposed the local communist administration or simply to humiliate the richer citizens, but most often than not this was caused by the sheer shortage of the living space.

The assignment of tenants and residents did not last too long, and became rarer and rarer in the mid 1950s until the aforementioned decree has been formally revoked by the adoption of the Residential Local Act of 30th January 1959 in the wake of the increased reconstruction efforts and development of the residential infrastructure. The nationalized residential buildings were not returned to their previous owners and remained the state property. It should have been noted that the idea or the 'housing space limit' remained and the owners of flats and houses larger than a specified limit were obliged to pay an additional tax.

​

Fermus-Bobowiec, A., Problem „kwaterunku” lokali mieszkalnych w ustawodawstwie i nauce Polski Ludowej [The problem of „billeting” of dwellings in the legislation and scholarship of the Polish People’s Republic] in: Scientific Journals of the Humanistic and Natural University in Siedlce, series: Administration and Management, No. 104, 2015.