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Introduction: Does the "housing issue" continue to spoil us?
The affirmative answer does not seem as obvious today as it did in the recent past. The topic of affordable housing seems to be pushed out of the list of undoubted priorities, for several reasons. Local authorities, who are responsible for the condition of housing, realizing that we are talking about long-term work, without feeling much pressure from above, lose interest in the topic. In addition, the indicators of average security in the country have gradually shifted over half a century from the risky 4-6 m² per person to 22-23 m². Business construction and construction, development, real estate, the current state of deficit and a controlled market is quite satisfactory. Society, more than anyone else interested in housing affordability, reacts differently. The least protected and at the same time the most passive and needy part of him almost resigned to the inevitable. A more active public is looking for a way out on their own, far from always relying on mortgages and often taking advantage of certain indulgences of recent years, incl. the opportunity to register and live all year round in summer cottages and garden plots, the admissibility of various, incl. semi-legal types of lease, etc.
The condition of housing is preserved or is changing by inertia, remaining, although not particularly joyful, but quite tolerable background of more exciting events. The acute condition turned into a chronic one, which, however, does not exclude the need for treatment, but of a clearly different nature than in the 1950s or 1970s.
Affordable housing is closely related to what is called "quality of life", "lifestyle" and is a powerful argument in the continuous rivalry between cities and countries. And even if we firmly decide to refuse to participate in international competitions and “live our own way”, life is 30 m² better and more promising than 15 m².
Russia is hardly the last country in the northern hemisphere to make housing affordable. The world's first socialist state lost this competition between quasi-socialist Europe and capitalist America, leaving a difficult legacy to its successor. And, although today we are solving our problems in a new company for us in developing countries like China and Brazil, it would be a mistake to forget our own experience, positive and negative, and not take advantage of someone else's - the experience of post-war Europe with its current 40 m² per person and the experience of the United States. with 70 m² per shower.
However, there are not so many effective and realistic ways and means of solving the housing problem, and turning to experience alone does not guarantee success in the specific conditions of modern Russia. Therefore, accurate and unexpected ideas are no less in demand than experience.
I… Experience of Russia - XX century
The housing issue, which has worried Europe since the middle of the 19th century, became relevant for Russia after the Civil War and acquired particular urgency in the process of collectivization and industrialization, mass exodus from villages and the rapid growth of large cities. The three subsequent attempts to solve it are marked by a common feature - the exclusive role of the state, paradoxically combined with the incompleteness of each of the attempts and the fundamental lack of continuity between them.
The first attempt, which took place in the 1920s and 1930s, was carried out under the slogan of a “new way of life” and was accompanied by the abolition of private ownership of land and urban real estate. Revealing of "surplus" of area, "compaction", redistribution, room-by-room settlement were combined with an almost uncontested system of social hiring and complete insecurity of tenants. The owners of both the housing built before the revolution and the newly built housing were the city authorities, less often departments (as a rule, "power"), enterprises and trade unions. The total volume of accomplishments in more than two post-revolutionary decades has not radically changed the appearance of Russian cities. The result of this time was the reality of communal apartments and barracks ("there is only one restroom for thirty-eight rooms") and great architectural innovations and discoveries. One of the discoveries that gave rise to an almost new type of housing - the "minimum cell", genetically related to the compartment and cabins - the living space of the individual. The compressed mass of such cells, strung on corridors and galleries, is the main component of communal houses, the most famous of which is the house-city of Ivan Nikolaev. Another innovation is compact sections and apartments - spaces for family life, which were a kind of concession to the bourgeois past and rely on contemporary German experience. These apartments ("sections") had a difficult, but long life under the name of a multi-section building, which became the main architectural hit of the second half of the twentieth century.
The relatively modest residential blotches of the "red belt" of Moscow, the more solid residential areas of Novokuznetsk and Magnitogorsk, the workers' settlements of the giants of the social housing issue.
The signs of the "new world", "new way of life" and "new man" were remarkably combined with less vivid, but much larger-scale traces of the activities of the citizens themselves, who became more active in the short period of the NEP, such as housing cooperatives of lawyers, doctors and other "fellow travelers", and new suburban settlements. At the same time, practical leaders of local Soviets resort to extensive use of the hidden resources of the bourgeois city, adapting sheds, basements and semi-basements for housing, carrying out a massive add-on of up to five floors of 2- and 3-storey buildings in the center of Moscow (most of which have acquired much needed »Elevators only after four decades).
The harsh practice of solving the housing problem - common kitchens, dining rooms, toilets and bedrooms - by the mid-30s lost its attractiveness in the eyes of the new elite. Then Karo Halabyan saw his task and the task of his colleagues in "showing the world the wealth of the proletariat." This wealth, including housing, still belongs to the state and controlled structures, and rooms and apartments are distributed free of charge and assigned to tenants on the same terms as before: social employment rights, often with symbolic payments for utilities.
The theme of "new way of life", and with it - the ideas of new residential areas and cities, garden cities, is completely replaced by the theme of "reconstruction", i.e. transformation of the existing material, first of all - "old Moscow". The housing problem is no longer worth fearing, since the population size, the number of lucky people who can count on living in the capital or in a big city, is now determined by the number of houses, apartments, rooms and square meters built, and not vice versa. The institution of registration and the restriction of civil rights make it possible to strictly regulate the number of applicants for housing. From now on, there can be no problems in the country. A private apartment, especially a summer residence, has become a luxury item and a means of encouragement.
The general plan of Moscow in 1935, which absorbed all the characteristic attributes of a neoclassical city - a city of ensembles - with highways, squares, embankments and the metro, became the manifesto of the time. The material from which this luxury is assembled is the "enlarged" but still versatile multifunctional quarter with a clearly defined perimeter, with houses with front and rear facades, and an extensive common courtyard.
The liquidation of private land holdings that began after the revolution, and their unification, which became possible as a result of the abolition of land ownership and "demeaning", gave rise to the phenomenon of a common courtyard, characteristic only for Russia. Moscow, small and medium-sized Russian cities with flexible and easily transformable fabric, after communal apartments, received a communal courtyard that raised generations of our compatriots. This courtyard anticipated the huge courtyards of the enlarged quarters, which unfortunately did not rid the city of barracks, room-by-room settlements, inhabited sheds and cellars.
The topic of mass housing became relevant in the process of post-war reconstruction, when the acute need revived the mind and gave rise to many witty and effective solutions, which unfortunately found themselves in the shadow of the construction of the ceremonial Khreshchatyk and Moscow high-rise buildings. It is about turning to low-rise and cottage construction. The Academy of Architecture, local and central authorities, departments, defense industry enterprises, high professionals and ordinary architects offered what is quite relevant today. An exciting display of post-war projects brings together eco-friendly, energy efficient small manor single-family homes - both prefabricated, industrially made, and from natural and local piece materials, easy to design and operate. The streets and quarters of two-three-storey houses in Minsk, Stalingrad, Smolensk, Moscow, Vyazma, Tver, undoubtedly influenced by what they saw in Europe, compare favorably with those that arose later in the neighborhood. Their principal feature was technological diversity, which allowed, among other things, traditional, amateur, handicraft, semi-handicraft performance and a high level of maintainability. The traditional and decisive refusal of the state to share responsibility for solving the "housing problem" with citizens became a verdict for most of the ideas of that time.
The recognition that the "housing issue" really exists, and that everyone, without exception, has the right to decent housing, came only in the mid-1950s. By this time, the class struggle with the use of special places of residence and employment, which were under the jurisdiction of the GULAG, began to gradually subside, and the number of injured or denied rights, including passportless villagers, began to decline noticeably. The "housing problem" acquired the features of a crisis, the way out of which the country began to look for ten years later than devastated Europe and twenty years later than the United States emerging from the pre-war crisis.
But the domestic and Western scenarios for overcoming the crisis are similar only at the initial stage, when the state provides free housing to a significant number of homeless and poor people. This is where the similarities end. The Western scenario assumes the gradual withdrawal of the state and considers the affordability of housing as a condition for self-development, self-movement of a person or family, endowed with increasing responsibility and independence. The state's efforts are aimed at ensuring that the next generations of residents of social housing become self-sufficient people, for whom the mortgage is no longer something inaccessible and unbearable. The domestic scenario, on the contrary, provided for the constant expansion of the role and responsibility of the authorities, which was facilitated by the unrelenting gap between the income of the population and the cost of apartments. And, although it was at this time that the Russian middle class began to form with its characteristic attributes: an apartment in a panel house, a dacha on six hundred square meters and "Zhiguli", its ability to self-propel and self-reproduce was severely limited.
The more the state built, the more it had to build, to which the naturally growing needs of society and the lack of other ways to satisfy them were pushing. At the same time, the late start allowed Russia to use the methods and means of mass housing construction that had already been discovered. It is characteristic that their own experience was not taken into account and, apparently, three borrowed versions were discussed.
The "North American" version, which preferred individual residential buildings made on the basis of a wooden frame, with vast areas, cars and highways, had little chance of recognition and implementation in Russia at that time.
The "British version", which offered satellite cities, relatively autonomous, remote from the big city and connected with it by high-speed rail transport, with different types of housing, different construction technologies and a full set of all the attributes of a city started from scratch, was only partially applicable and therefore fulfilled hardly once.
The French version turned out to be the most accessible and closest, although, perhaps, what, in the end, turned out, by itself resembles this very version, based on the use of a large-panel apartment building, which ousted fields and villages from the city outskirts. The industrial production of multi-storey, multi-apartment housing is becoming the main sign of the times and the main tool for solving the "housing problem". Houses cease to be built "for centuries", acquire a resemblance to movable objects, get service life, and their maintainability loses its significance. The temporary nature of the industrial panel house corresponded in the understanding of the socialist and communist leaders of French municipalities to its role as an instrument of temporary social support, a means of bringing people out of a crisis state. As this program is fulfilled and completed, such houses are liquidated and replaced by fundamentally different ones. In our practice, this housing is imperceptible, but stubbornly turned into a permanent and the only one possible.
An extremely rational and rigidly organized huge industry encompassed everything that had to do with mass housing: research and design institutes, house-building factories and construction and installation enterprises. The practice of standard and experimental design is being formed, standards and standards of apartments and houses are being created. A new regulatory framework and urban planning doctrine is emerging, based on the idea of a microdistrict divided into residential groups and included in a residential area. Model microdistricts of the first generation of Moscow, St. Petersburg or the Baltic States, completely pedestrianized and clearly located for children, assembled from five-story panel houses surrounded by overgrown greenery, with sufficient care, look quite attractive to this day.
The peak in the development of the USSR, which fell in the 70s - 80s, was marked by at least two "landmark" projects, the "House of New Life" by Nathan Osterman and the Northern Chertanovo district of Mikhail Posokhin. They not only brought us closer to the breakaway West, but also challenged the microdistrict and the graded service system, offering something more compact, practical and comfortable. Unfortunately, these experiments, like many of the undoubted achievements of Soviet modernism, arousing deserved interest today, did not receive continuation and turned out to be the last costly attempt to resist inertia.
Further movement followed the path of simplification, naive pragmatism, growth of restrictions and conservation of technologies. "Complexity" of development, normative security lost their mandatory character, free planning gave way to chaos and "game without rules", and the suburbs and outskirts turned into warehouses for the products of house-building factories. This state was a direct consequence of the fateful decision of Nikita Khrushchov to subordinate the architect to the builder, which immediately made the interests of the builder and construction more significant than the interests of both individual residents and the city as a whole.
For all the dissimilarity of the three Soviet housing policies (or doctrines), they have a common feature that can be defined as state utopianism. This is a disregard for real interests, needs and opportunities in the name of firm adherence to a non-alternative, abstract, but “ideologically correct” scheme. The gigantic seventy years of effort expended by the omnipotent state in such a bizarre way were not enough. Although, perhaps, the desire to control everything and everyone, including personal and family life, was more weighty than anything else. A managed deficit is one of the most effective control instruments.
II… After utopias
The last twenty years have not been without promises of the state in fashionable forms of "target program" and "national project" to finally solve the housing issue, this time taking into account the peculiarities and possibilities of the market economy.
A fundamental innovation is the division in the past of a single array of housing into two comparable categories - commercial, presented on the market, and social, as before, transferred free of charge. The impetus for the transformation of housing into a commodity was the free privatization of apartments - perhaps the most decisive gesture of the new government, undertaken in the interests of citizens. This led to a decrease in people's dependence on the state, the formation of a market and mortgages and, ultimately, to a decrease in the severity of the housing problem for the middle class.
The market and market relations made it possible to manifest a natural interest in suburban and suburban housing, in a private or low-rise house. The share of low-rise and individual houses in the total volume of housing commissioned in the country began to grow steadily and, according to some estimates, is approaching 50%. This is an undoubted sign of a spontaneous, unintentional formation of a phenomenon that is new for Russia, called suburbanization, and a new way of life, in which an apartment and a dacha, turning into a country house, change roles.
A feature of the Russian market is the increased attention of developers and builders to expensive and super-expensive housing, which undoubtedly exerts pressure on the price level in all other segments and significantly distorts the overall picture. The average welfare indicator, so revered in Soviet times of universal equality and relatively adequately reflecting the state of affairs, has lost its former significance. The polarization of incomes was followed by the polarization of living conditions. The significant increase in the housing stock observed in recent decades, apparently, was absorbed by representatives of the wealthiest part of society and did not lead to a significant decrease in the number of citizens dissatisfied with living conditions. The problem of housing, traditionally a problem of the poor and vulnerable, those who are not of interest to the current market, do not care about the current entrepreneur. It was he who convinced the state and the authorities that the main instrument for solving the problem should be a mortgage, to the aid of which maternity capital, certificates and benefits come. Meanwhile, the circle of people and families who have access to commercial housing today is many times already the circle of those in need. Mortgages are not becoming more popular and affordable due to the obvious disparity between the price of a "square" and the income of citizens. Citizens cannot, business does not want to.
Compared to commercial housing, the fate of social housing is less clear. Despite the vast experience accumulated by the country, the certainty and breadth of the circle of those in need, the realization that social housing in its various forms is the main instrument for solving the housing problem is clearly lagging behind. The state prudently divided with citizens not only its huge property, but also its responsibility.
Today local authorities with their modest budgets and limited rights are responsible for providing housing for all the haves and, most importantly, the have-nots. The trap lies both in the conditions of this problem and in the methods of solution that are set by the municipalities themselves. The picture is complemented by the absence of national methods of qualification of dilapidated and dilapidated housing, housing requiring major or current repairs, the lack of housing standards of one type or another and quality. There are different methods of selection and assessment of applicants for social housing, the procedure for its distribution and receipt. The construction of social housing should theoretically be financed by the local budget. At the same time, the administration acts as a customer-developer, whose main partner is a contractor who is completely freed from state protection, who has become an entrepreneur, and therefore is not inclined to reduce the price of his services. In practice, however, this scenario does not occur very often.
The task of forming a local market for affordable housing is no less difficult for local authorities. housing, the price of which is clearly correlated with the income of citizens. The more affordable such housing, the shorter the queue for social housing, and vice versa. Commercial housing is being built at the expense of an investor who hires a customer or independently acted in this role. In turn, the customer chooses a contractor and a designer or takes on the job himself (this kind of combination of roles in Russia is the norm, but in the rest of the world, as a rule, it is not encouraged). The task of the municipality in this scenario is reduced to the allocation of land, and it is this lever, in the absence of other possibilities, is often used to replenish the fund of social housing.
It was assumed that the parallel action of the two scenarios would allow the formation of both a fund of social housing and an extensive, open market for commercial and affordable housing. The construction industry was expected to be roughly the same as what happened in the jeans and automobiles market. The turning point did not come either in the "dashing nineties", nor in the "fat zero", or in the recent stable ones. The reasons are the fundamental differences between a product completely produced in the country and purchased abroad. If there were no imports, we would have driven Zhiguli cars.
The domestic construction business is undoubtedly a more united, powerful and more motivated player than municipalities or their departments, especially individual citizens. The builder, customer and investor, who turned from employees of state-owned enterprises and Soviet institutions into entrepreneurs, quickly learned the rules of the game, the main measure of success in which is profit. The post-Soviet reality has created ideal conditions for their business. A state of sustained scarcity instantly turned a panel apartment, recently distributed free of charge, into a hot commodity. The unbearable task of reducing the deficit in the past has been replaced by the quite feasible task of maintaining it, primarily in the popular urban housing market.
The inertia inherent in technology, in the system of relations between construction site participants, in their hereditary memory, the passion of the current bosses for enlargements, amalgamations, pyramidal schemes are preserved by special structures that avoid openness and competition and resemble "soft monopolies" that are quite compatible with antimonopoly legislation. This mechanism automatically prevents and successfully resists the arrival of technologies that have long been tested in the world around us and have proven the effectiveness of technologies, such as those that, for example, are based on the use of wood and its derivatives.
"Soft monopoly" creates a reliable system of control over the market, making it a "seller's market", selling goods of often uncertain quality and uncertain cost. You have to buy not what you need, but what you have. This, however, does not apply to the rich, for whom there is a completely free market, and the poor, who have nothing to go to any market with.
The seller's market does not strive for variety and renewal, a change of decor, easy styling is the maximum concession to the buyer, designed to keep unchanged, to maximize the life of his product. A large entrepreneur who has merged with the municipal authorities, who forms a real housing policy, turns out to be no less tough censor than the Soviet state. The most comfortable for him is the absence of external disturbing influences, any doctrines, concepts, principles, i.e. a kind of ideological and intellectual vacuum.
The country, which for many decades followed the most severe state regulations, suddenly changed itself, abandoning at once both the regulations and the effective state participation. For the first time in many years, radical changes in the government and the economy did not lead to a revision of the foundations of housing policy, did not touch on one of the most sensitive and popular topics in the past - the topic of cities. The contractor and developer, builder and any entrepreneur, no matter how patriotic they are, will not solve the housing problem, and this is not their task. The situation can only be rectified by returning to a large state with its unique vertical the role of a regulator capable of maintaining the balance of interests of business and citizens.
III… People and meters
What the housing issue looks like today is not easy to understand in the absence of measurements, surveys and studies that are constantly carried out throughout the country on the basis of uniform methods. It is possible to compensate for the lack of knowledge only in part, acting on the example of those who are engaged in solving mysteries and restoring an integral picture on the basis of private, incomplete and indirect data, relying primarily on logic and common sense. These tools are quite enough to build a general outline of what is happening, abandoning claims for high accuracy in advance.
Work of this kind can be based on several basic indicators, the credibility of which is confirmed mainly by the frequency of references and the presence in different sources. And the discrepancy between the data is mitigated by the use of rounded and arithmetic means.
The first of these indicators, which is cited quite often, although it makes a shocking impression, is the number of our fellow citizens who have objective and confirmed reasons to be dissatisfied with living conditions, the quality or size of housing, and more often both. There are approximately 70% of them, i.e. about 100 million people (or 35 million families).
The second, no less alarming indicator characterizes the technical condition of the housing stock. According to the estimates of the Ministry of Construction and local authorities, obviously not striving to improve the quality criteria, half of the apartment buildings, not to mention individual houses, primarily rural ones, belong to the categories of emergency, dilapidated, requiring overhaul and repair of varying degrees of complexity.
If we proceed from the average provision in the country of 22 m² per person, then we can talk about one and a half billion square meters, which are essentially substandard. The condition of these meters, apparently, is complemented by another level of security, most likely below the national average. It is curious that at a conventionally taken rate of 15 m² per person, the number of inhabitants of low-quality housing becomes equal to the previously named number of unsatisfied people, i.e. about 100 million (theoretically, among the dissatisfied and needy there may be those who live in relatively prosperous, but overcrowded houses and apartments, where there is about 10 m2 per person, however, the weight of such housing and the share of those living there, apparently, is not so great and stay within the "limits of statistical error").
It can be assumed that that half of all Russian housing, which is relatively high-quality and prosperous, belongs mainly to 30% or 40-50 million satisfied, well-equipped citizens with a higher level of security, about 30-40 m² / person. The other half of the fund and almost two thirds of the population living here are a problem area.
The solution of the housing issue has traditionally been associated with the construction of new housing, the volumes of which are calculated without much difficulty. For example, reaching the level of provision equal to 30 m² per person will require about one and a half billion new "squares", which will take 10-15 years, while maintaining the current growth rates of commissioning. At the same time, a gradual approach to the "sacred", according to the feelings of the bosses, the norm of 15 m² / person. possible in 5-7 years. Achievement of the European average means a doubling of the fund and the corresponding time frame.
However, concern about the meters to be commissioned today is clearly complemented by the theme of the declining quality of existing, long-built apartments and houses. From the sphere of new construction, problems, interests and accents are gradually shifting towards reconstruction and repair, which is not easy, but it is necessary to get used to in connection with the threatening growth of the array of substandard housing. Without ensuring the quality level of the existing fund, move on and increase the volume of new construction at the expense of hard-to-repair houses, i.e. without looking back at the past, is tantamount to waging a war without a home front and a reserve.
An indispensable condition for an effective, efficient, efficient housing policy, and the correctness of decisions made is targeting, based on a clear understanding of each of the dissatisfied and in need of housing.
Large and small families or just single individuals are in the role of needy. In one case, these are families seeking to improve their living conditions, i.e. having a certain start-up capital, "living space", savings, etc., and who want to acquire a certain "delta", which allows them to immediately, through resettlement or resettlement, improve the situation of all family members. In another case, these are families starting from scratch, without or having lost their start-up capital: young people, young families, internally displaced persons, immigrants, inhabitants of houses in unpromising villages, apartments in single-industry towns and “hot spots”. The situation is easiest for those inclined and able to use the mortgage in its modern form. Until recently, this group included 15% of the country's population, or 15–20 million people, ie. the solvent part of the dissatisfied, with savings, stable and high income, "basic living space", etc.
A special category unites people who are relatively solvent, as a rule active, but poor - those to whom the current market does not offer an adequate product. Therefore, they rely not so much on mortgages as on their own strengths, non-standard solutions, various forms of self-organization, such as cooperatives and “youth residential complexes” that existed in Soviet times, etc. The share of awaiting "democratic mortgages" or "quasi-mortgages" with a fall in real incomes may sharply increase and even exceed the number of adherents of traditional mortgages, of course, if the state and business will meet them halfway.
Both of the above groups can include potential and real residents of commercial rental housing, both adapted for delivery and specially created. Although “tenants” in a number of quite prosperous countries often make up the majority of the population, in modern Russia their share in the foreseeable future may be in the range of up to 20% (25–30 million people). This means that about 40% of Russia's population, about 60 million in need, are potentially able to improve their living conditions by addressing the commercial segment in different versions, many of which simply need to be developed from scratch.
Among the remaining 30-40 million applying for social housing, which is transferred both for ownership and for rent, the most protected are “benefit recipients, state employees,” civil servants, military personnel, doctors, teachers and their families. They are closely followed by veterans, disabled people, orphans, those on the waiting list who are lucky with the municipal authorities, participants in state programs, special projects, people who have suffered as a result of accidents and disasters. 15–20% of the total population, or 20 million people - these are the possible parameters of this group, regardless of the real ability to pay, which is not focused on buying a home.
The most problematic category includes the insolvent, those who are indifferent to mortgages and commercial hiring, are incapable and not inclined to be active and self-organizing, and are becoming an obvious burden for local authorities. These are young people who find themselves without the support of their elders, young families, single mothers, students, old people who find themselves without the support of young people and have no savings, the disabled, and finally, migrants and a special group of the unemployed and socially disadvantaged, incl. prone to diviant behavior. According to the above indications, there is practically no legal basis for the provision of free housing, and the fate of people is completely dependent on the capabilities and disposition of the local authorities. The size of this group can reach 15–20% of the total population of the country (about 20 million). If you do not set yourself the goal of returning these people to society and the economy, which are in dire need of hands and heads, then the likelihood of conservation of this category of those in need is very high.
The array of social housing required for the two above-mentioned roughly equal groups of applicants may account for about a quarter of the total national stock.
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