Pride in Ownership Takes Root in Russia

When Mikhail Kapustin first moved his wife and four daughters into a new apartment at 81 Leninsky Prospekt, they were greeted by withering glances and whispered warnings.

“Don’t let us catch you lighting up in the elevator!” neighbors cautioned the nonsmokers.

Kapustin’s wife, Lyudmilla, was haughtily informed that residents refrain from hanging laundry on the balconies and take care to neatly dispose of their trash.

Months went by without an untoward incident involving the Kapustin children, yet busybodies would routinely check the entrance and stairwell for graffiti in expectation that the girls might have vandalized their new home.

In their own rude way, the admonishments of the neighbors are testimony to the pride in ownership revisiting Russians after more than seven decades of Communist rule, when private property was vilified as decadent and evidence of social exploitation.

More than half of Russian families own their homes today, and the growing recognition of housing as an individual’s most valuable asset is fostering a more protective and nurturing instinct visible in the clean stairwells, trim lawns and uniformed concierges standing guard by doors.

Privatization of Soviet-era housing gave millions of families title to their modest apartments at little or no cost. A boom in new private construction, which is greatly outpacing the construction of government-built housing, has rapidly converted other Russians from public tenants to private owners and restored housing here to its traditional place as the primary indicator of citizens’ prosperity and social status.

At the 198-unit building at 81 Leninsky Prospekt, the Kapustins are one of a handful of families who have received free housing through an increasingly popular scheme uniting city governments and private builders. In return for the right to build on city property, the developer turned over a small share of the new apartments for distribution to those whose housing needs were never fully satisfied during the Communist era. The rest of the units were sold privately by the developers.

Those lucky enough to gain quarters in private buildings like 81 Leninsky say they revel in the rising quality of this most vital element of living standards and emulate the reverence of their neighbors toward the refuges they now call their own.

“We are cultured people and would never dream of defacing the common areas of our building,” says Lyudmilla Kapustin in reply to her neighbors’ suppositions. “But it is true that the hallways in our old city apartment smelled terribly and the walls were covered with graffiti. Here we can turn a more dignified face to the rest of the world.”

For Russians, being herded into communal apartments where baths and kitchens were shared by dozens is now widely considered to have been one of the most common and gravest indignities of the Communist era.

The Bolsheviks’ brutal breakup of aristocratic old houses along Nevsky Prospekt in this former imperial capital and in the once-elegant merchant streets of Moscow has been brought to the world’s notice through satire and cinema and has been chronicled as the curse of a misguided ideology in literary works ranging from Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella “Heart of a Dog,” with its rubes on the DomKom--the housing committee.

Decades of Indifference

“No one paid anything for housing in the years after the revolution, and the government promised to take care of everything for the workers,” says Leonid Chernyshov, head of reform programs within the federal Committee on Housing and Construction Policy. “Tenants simply waited for the state to come to their buildings to do the cleaning and painting and garbage removal. But what happened was that everyone became indifferent to the common areas and stopped considering them part of what they called home.”

More than 75% of Russians live in apartments rather than single-family houses, a consequence of the mass industrialization after the Bolshevik Revolution that forced millions from the countryside to cities, where they were crowded into the separate rooms of confiscated old houses--the infamous kommunalki, or communal apartments. After World War II destroyed more housing, the state focused on cheap, prefabricated, high-density buildings.

Living space remains woefully insufficient throughout Russia in both quantity and quality. Even as the notorious waiting lines for goods and services ubiquitous during the Soviet era have all but disappeared, the unsatisfied hunger for a family’s most cherished acquisition--a home--remains strong.

But from private builders and public assistance planners to the underserved millions languishing on waiting lists for new state-financed homes, there is emerging a sense of recovery from that era of destruction.

Big Brother is bowing out as ubiquitous landlord, with a federal edict on housing reform signed by President Boris N. Yeltsin earlier this year dictating that city governments divest themselves of responsibility for housing over the next decade.

More than 30% of municipal resources are spent each year on building, distributing, heating, lighting and repairing public housing, and, as the Russian government seeks to lessen the state’s role in social matters, the desire to promote private home ownership has become its No. 1 priority.

While the challenge of making housing a matter for families instead of governments may seem daunting, the huge costs of the current system are providing an impetus for phasing out inept city public works agencies in favor of private enterprise.

“The cash crisis in local governments is the biggest friend to reform,” says Raymond Struyk, program director for Russia with the Washington-based Urban Institute, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Only with the threat of federal funding cuts have local officials heeded the call to extricate themselves from housing management, and federal government agencies have only recently shown themselves willing to help.

“The question is finally being asked here: What is it that touches people’s lives most directly every day? Hello, it’s where they live,” Struyk says.

Private contracting firms are among the fastest-growing businesses now, as builders gear up for a steady, if agonizingly slow, improvement of the economy.

“We believe we are participating in the construction of a middle class in Russia,” says Alexander Makarov, president of the Rosstro construction enterprise that builds apartments in St. Petersburg. It sells 93% of the new homes and gives 7% to the city as housing for those with no means and no choice but to wait for a state handout.

Housing still falls miserably below Western standards, but those carrying out reforms point to measurable progress.

“The housing situation in Moscow has undoubtedly improved, as the average 10 years ago was about 14 square meters per person [151 square feet] and now it has risen to about 20 [216 square feet],” says Vladimir Resin, deputy mayor of the Russian capital, which is home to 10 million.

“But we have social debts that date back to the Soviet regime in the form of millions of families still waiting for housing,” Resin says. “As heirs to power, we [city officials] have an obligation to fulfill the promises made to these families across Russia.”

Moscow’s housing plan calls for building 22 million square feet of housing a year through 2010, but Resin notes that 54 million square feet in the dilapidated Khrushcheby--Khrushchev’s slums--are destined to meet with the wrecking ball in the same period.

While most of the new apartments rising in central Moscow are elegant glass-and-marble towers aimed at the foreign market and newly rich Russians, Resin insists that the bulk of construction over the past two years has been of working-class apartments with one, two or three rooms.

Effect on Market

The gush of privately financed living space has helped bring prices down in astronomically expensive Moscow. Each square foot of space in new buildings now commands about $93, or about 20% less than two years ago, during the worst shortage of quality housing. But even in today’s improved market, that puts the typical three-room, 850-square-foot home at about $80,000, in a country where the average monthly salary--at least officially--is less than $200.

Construction costs are ridiculously high because there is still little competition among builders, especially in Moscow, where city officials have been reluctant to relax their grip on development, says Irina Yasina, an economic analyst for the daily Izvestia.

Owners in private buildings must pay bigger shares of the costs for utilities, garbage collection and other services, though those are still subsidized by the state. In Mikhail Kapustin’s clean but modest building, monthly utility and maintenance costs run him about $54--a hefty share of the defense-industry worker’s $220 pay.

But most people living in privately maintained housing say the investment is worth it, because the change has transformed the atmosphere they encounter outside their doors.

“People always behaved toward government property as if it belonged to nobody,” says Gennady Lobok, whose Fregat company provides private maintenance and security for buildings housing about 7% of Moscow’s population. “You can still tell the difference between public property and private immediately by the state of their common areas, or I should say the smell of their common areas.”

The suburban Vykhino region of Moscow is an impressive example of how private ownership has affected the way Russians live. Manicured lawns extend from the freshly painted high-rises arrayed around a pedestrian shopping street, where park benches and playgrounds have been built for shoppers and strollers.

“Whoever would have thought that life would get better for us?” says a bemused Galina Zhdanova, a 57-year-old retired engineer rewarded by her employer with a new Vykhino apartment three years ago. “Where we used to live, on Sevastopol Street, I was afraid to go into the stairwells on my own.”

Lengthy Path Ahead

Sadly, most city-owned buildings still are scarred with graffiti and befouled by waste left by pets and passersby in need of a toilet, reminding Russians of the lengthy path still to be traveled to overcome their country’s housing woes.

Renovations, sales and swaps are simpler now that the state is breaking its monopolies, but the poorest and the oldest often remain at the mercy of the dwellings dealt them in another age.

Boris Belyayev has lived in two cluttered rooms of a communal apartment on Nekrasov Street for 24 years and holds no hope that the crumbling building will be renovated in his lifetime.

“We can’t organize ourselves [for renovation] because no one owns his own space and no one cares,” says the 63-year-old retired submarine construction worker. “But home is home. I do what I can, since the housing maintenance workers never come here. I would fix her up myself if I only had the money.”