Urban Institute Assists Russian Housing Reform
According to Raymond Struyk, resident director of the Urban Institute’s Technical Cooperative Program in Moscow, housing reform in Russia has made important progress, especially in the rental sector.
- rents, which have represented about 1% of family income, are being raised gradually across the country;
- housing allowance programs are being established for the indigent (financed by the higher rental income of municipalities); and
- the quality of maintenance services are being improved.
Two-thirds of all jurisdictions in the Russian Federation have now raised rents and established housing allowance programs. Additionally, over 30% of all eligible housing units have been privatized in Russia, and new housing production is showing its first increase in seven years.
The major obstacle to further reform now is the completion of a comprehensive set of laws on housing. Assisting Russia in developing such laws and in other aspects of reforming this critical economic sector is the Urban Institute, a nonprofit policy research and educational organization established in Washington, DC, in 1968. With funding from USAID, the Urban Institute began work in Moscow in mid-1992, assembling a project team in which, today, Russian professionals outnumber Americans.
The principal activities of the program are:
- advising the Russian government on housing reform legislation, e.g., the Law on Fundamentals of Housing Policy, a Moscow regulation on condominiums, and a forthcoming Law on Mortgage;
- carrying out a series of demonstration projects, e.g., placing thousands of municipal rental units in Moscow and Nizhni Novgorod oblast under the management of several independent, private maintenance firms, and evaluating the experience;
- development of detailed procedures and supporting materials for implementing simultaneously broad-scale rent increases and programs of housing allowances (subsidies);
- training and advising personnel in eight cities, mostly in Central Russia, in the development of condominiums;
- working initially with Mosbusinessbank and more recently with ten additional Russian commercial banks to provide training and assist staff in strengthening all phases of long-term mortgage lending: documentation, loan servicing, risk management, etc.
The materials developed under the last program are being made available to other banks through the production of a Mortgage Handbook series, being published by the Center for Mortgage Business in Moscow.
The Urban Institute offers a list of "Papers on Housing in Russia," the great majority of which exist in Russian translation. Among these are:
- Housing Privatization in Urban Russia
- Condominium Operations and Management Training Manual
- Private Contractor Training Materials for Privatization of Maintenance and Management of Municipal Housing
- Private Maintenance for Moscow’s Municipal Housing: Does It Work?
- Presentation to the Six-City Seminar on Title Registration, Land Use Regulation and Land Allocation
- Housing Allowances Administration Procedures Manual
- Alternative Mortgage Instruments in High-Inflation Economies
To request these documents, or the full list of publications, and for any further information, contact the Institute’s offices in Moscow or Washington, DC:
Mr. Raymond Struyk
Urban Institute Russian Office
Prospekt Mira 19, 3rd floor, room 317-19
Moscow 129090
Tel: (095) 971-1254
Fax: 288-9384
Ms. Vida R. Megahed
International Activities Center
The Urban Institute
2100 M Street, NW
Washington, DC 20037
Tel: (202) 857-8775
Fax: (202) 466-3982
This article is from the January 1995 issue of
Civil Society ... East and West
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The URL for this page is: http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~ccsi/csew/95-01/urban.htm
Last updated: March 28 1996
