Translated material
Janitors, get out!
Moscow authorities will forcibly evict employees of corporatized public health units from municipal service housing
It seems that the city authorities have found a way to make up for the shortage of municipal housing for the undiminished army of thousands of city people on the waiting list. The fact that in the capital’s districts “a system has begun for the release of residential areas recognized as illegally occupied on various grounds”, and that “sweeping out” of illegal residents will mainly be apartments that were once provided as official housing to janitors and other employees of city public utilities, he said yesterday at a press conference, the head of the department of housing policy and housing stock of the city, Petr Saprykin.“Today, the directorates of a single customer are becoming joint-stock companies and no longer belong to the city; they must provide their employees with housing on their own, buying it on the market,” said Mr. Saprykin. In addition, according to the official, due to the fact that the human resource of the city’s public utilities system, which is transitioning to market relations, is mostly represented by labor migrants, now the work to identify and evict one way or another illegally settled in city service apartments of public utility workers “has intensified due to with strict migration policies."
City officials were forced to publicly declare the “policy of releasing illegally occupied housing in Moscow” by the story of the eviction of a janitor from Uzbekistan, Khusain Iskhakov, from an apartment provided to him by the district repair and maintenance department of the housing stock (SUE REU) in 2002 on the basis of an employment contract, not a rental contract. . Let us recall that after the intervention of federal human rights activists and members of the Public Chamber in the fate of a large family of a complex cleaning worker, the conflict, in fact, was only postponed for a year (for this period, the city authorities provided the janitor with another temporary housing), during which he must independently resolve the housing issue . However, despite this “precedent of humanity,” according to Mr. Saprykin, officials do not intend to change their plans and delay in fulfilling the instructions of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov “to restore order in unauthorized housing and provide all vacated space for the benefit of those on the waiting list.”
Now, according to the Department of Housing Policy and Housing Fund, there are more than 160 thousand families on the waiting list for improved housing conditions, and the waiting period reaches 20 years. The number of illegally occupied apartments, or the “size of the disaster,” as Mr. Saprykin noted when answering a question from a Vremya Novostei correspondent, is about 300-400 units. However, this figure, according to him, is constantly growing, as more and more cases of fraud by residents and negligence of officials come to light.
Recalling, however, using the example of the so-called Butovo conflict, that not only disenfranchised foreigners, but also native residents of the capital become participants in apartment battles with the Moscow authorities, Pyotr Saprykin rather vaguely assured: “Individual decisions will be made in each specific case.”
“All residents legally occupying city office premises, including those on the waiting list for municipal housing, will live there until they improve their living conditions according to the priority order. This also applies to pensioners, for whom official housing was assigned in a social tenancy agreement,” the official said.
According to the leader of the Yabloko - United Democrats faction in the Moscow City Duma, Sergei Mitrokhin, until the city authorities make the register of the city's available housing stock public, all their attempts to use city property more efficiently will raise a wave of new housing conflicts. “We proposed publishing all the information about the Moscow housing stock so that city residents who are being relocated from demolished five-story buildings, for example, would not have questions about why, if there is housing in the city, they are often offered the outskirts and near Moscow region. Officials don’t want to do this,” Mr. Mitrokhin told Vremya Novostei. Therefore, according to him, the housing sector is still “muddy water, where both unauthorized seizure by citizens and violation of the legal rights of residents by the authorities can occur.”