Expert opinion

“The approach itself – with compensation for the investors’ costs — is perfectly sensible”, says Nadezhda Kosareva, President of IUE. Investors, however, think ‘on a large scale’. They are rarely satisfied with ‘one-off’ projects, unless these are in central zones (especially where town-planning regulations allow to produce more dwelling space than today).

“The most investment attractive destinations are territories, for example, a neighborhood area where, along with hazardous buildings, there are some objects that could also be demolished. Relevant legislation,...

On January 21, 2018, Irina Gentsler, Director of Urban Economy Department, IUE, spoke at a meeting held at the Federal Council. According to the expert, there is a need to shift from licensing of management organizations, which consists, in fact, in confirming the right to manage a certain apartment building, to confirming professional skills and competence of such organizations, in general.

The role of owners should also be strengthened. “It is suggested that the existence of a community of owners, who received their dwellings through privatization, purchase, and...

There exist two variants of amalgamation [of settlements]. The first one suggests a merger between bordering settlements. The practice is particularly widespread in the Komi Republic and the Saratov Region. The second one involves transformation of a municipal district into an urban okrug along with the subsequent abolition of all municipalities within the territory. The process is currently under way in the Moscow Region, the Stavropol territory and in other localities. No clear-cut criteria have been designed so far to determine what entity can or cannot be eligible for a merger. There...

Authors of the draft law “On Housing Redevelopment in the Russian Federation” consider that the main goal of the law is to put an end to simple substitution of hazardous housing [by replacement buildings] in the country. The document is rather small. It comprises only 30 pages. According to the draft law authors’ estimates, the regions willing to launch the process are still few in number: there are only 5–6 regions.

T. Polidi, Executive Director, IUE, has the...

“Elaboration of another document, strategy, land-use planning layout of an agglomeration would neither help solve the problem of management nor safeguard the interests of every municipality. The problem is that we have few figures. So, we are discussing the subject without having an idea about the underlying nature of the problem. I will give some figures now, - said she. There is, for example, a deep-seated myth that agglomerations play a significant role in the economy of Russia. But if so, we would have switched, long ago, from the macroeconomic model to the innovative one, and would...

In Kazan, officials from State Duma, the Council of Federation, the Ministry of Construction, discussed “housing aspects” of the presidential message delivered by Putin. Regional authorities were tasked with ensuring a 1.5 times increase in housing construction. One solution is to look as far back as Soviet times and restore the mechanism of housing construction cooperatives (HCCs) with apartments 50 percent cheaper, as compared with market prices, which makes the apartments affordable to public employees and families with many children. The work of HCCs is currently governed by...