N. Kosareva, IUE President, who heads a Commission on Housing Policy with the Public Council under the Ministry of Construction of Russia, at a meeting, presented a concept of how to streamline the legislative and regulatory framework for HCC.
N. Kosareva proposed to replicate the cooperatives created in Western countries where the ownership of the dwellings constructed lies with a cooperative acting as a legal entity rather than with an individual acting as an equity holder. Development of HCC shall help assure the affordability of dwelling units to persons with moderate income (among them persons on the affordable housing waiting list and other groups of people entitled to benefits), by way of reducing construction costs, and mitigate the risk of not selling a constructed dwelling unit, along with the risks to persons who invest in housing construction. This also shall help create a unified center for apartment building management.
The concept presented by N. Kosareva won support from Oleg Betin, Deputy Minister of Construction and Housing and Utilities Sector, who pointed to “the extreme urgency and utmost importance of the issue in view of the assignment on the part of the President of the Russian Federation with regard to preparing a set of measures aiming at developing various forms of cooperation in the area of housing construction including HCC”.
It is known that from September 1 the amendments to housing law shall come into force. The amendments shall enable state-supported HCC to erect buildings with apartments of any floor space whatsoever. By expert estimates, a HCC scheme has not yet reached its full capacity. “Under certain conditions it could have been in greater demand”, Nadezhda Kosareva notes. “In Soviet times cooperative construction accounted for around 8% of the total housing construction, which makes up a rather considerable portion thereof. The revival of cooperatives today is very important because the scheme really helps drastically reduce the costs incurred by individuals towards the solution of the housing problem. In fact, we elaborated the amendments, by way of initiative, aimed at developing a HCC scheme even beyond the framework of the Unified Development Institute in the Housing Sector. In the near future we plan to discuss the scheme with expert community”.
