"Bedrooms" save from the cold and divided love. With a risk to life Official statistics are always a little cunning: probably only a monk could live on the average salary in Russia, and even then during Great Lent. Most income...

"Bedrooms" save from the cold and divided love. At the risk of life

ABOUT

Official statistics are always a little cunning: probably only a monk could live on the average salary in Russia, and even then during Great Lent. The income of most Russian families has long been divided into two unequal parts: a tiny salary and money received from so-called part-time jobs. They seem to be the main resource of the Russian economy. Having calculated it, it is possible to accurately determine the financial "margin of safety" of our state.

In the last issue of the People's Budget column, Novaya Gazeta conducted an audit of the "media empire" consisting of several street outlets selling newspapers. Today we decided to study one of the segments of the capital's real estate market by calculating the income of a Muscovite who rents an apartment by the hour.

M

osqua knows how to be hospitable. True, only wealthy people can appreciate this talent: for nonresident holders of credit cards and large foreign currency accounts, the doors of all Moscow hotels are open. And the "guests of the capital", whose income falls within the framework of the contemptuous wording "living wage", usually stay in the "private sector". Fortunately, now the police rarely drive from the station squares attendants, hung with signs: "I rent an overnight stay." Yes, and in the newspapers you can find a lot of ads like this: “M. Baumanskaya, 15 min. tr., 3rd floor of a 5-storey building, 22 + 8 meters. $30 per person per day.”

Rooms in portions

An apartment on Baumanskaya is rented out by Aleksey Vitalievich, a man in his fifties in a tracksuit and a mouse-colored down jacket. Standard one-room cell. The decor is quite decent: a pull-out sofa, not old, but not very fresh either, with dirty brown stains on the green upholstery. The Yugoslav "wall", which stands here only "for furniture". It is immediately clear that it has not been used for a long time: the complete collection of Lenin's works gathers lonely dust on the bookshelves. On a dilapidated bedside table stands the bulk of the Soviet Rubin TV, which, oddly enough, works. By the window is a simple brown wooden table without a tablecloth and a couple of chairs with wobbly legs.

The room is clean. The carpet on the floor was recently vacuumed, the wallpaper is quite fresh but old-fashioned. The bathroom is also clean, only a few tiles have fallen off the walls in some places. The confident impression that no one lives in this apartment. At all.

The pleasure of becoming a temporary owner of such housing costs $ 30 per day. Moreover, the phrase from the announcement that each tenant would have to pay this money turned out to be an empty horror story. Alexei Vitalievich promised that a day in this apartment would cost us the same 30 bucks, but from both. It is possible - in rubles.

We don’t know what the owner of the living space thought about us there, but the very fact of renting an apartment for a day by two girls aroused suspicion in him. He asked for passports - to see the registration.

- For what? we were surprised.

- And if you don’t have a residence permit, and you burn down my apartment, where can I find you later? Or, say, you will drive customers ...

- What kind of clients?

I don't pry into your personal affairs. But I want to know who exactly will live in my apartment.

- Who do we look like?

“It doesn't concern me.

— And yet?

- Well ... judging by the fact that you look decent and rent an apartment for two for a day ... then ... - Alexei Vitalyevich snorted into his smoky mustache and blushed profusely.

In order not to arouse ridiculous suspicions in the landlord, we decided to show the cards:

- We are journalists, we write about the budget of the people ....

My own realtor

After some persuasion, Alexei Vitalyevich decided to tell us about his apartment business. He has been doing it for a long time. As he quit in 1995, he began to look for various ways to earn money.

- I didn’t work until retirement, so I went to the “bedrooms”.

He began to “use” the apartment on Baumanskaya about six months ago. Prior to that, he traded corners in a friend's five-room apartment. It is clear that a friend from this also dripped interest.

- The scheme was like this. During the day, I mostly hung around at the station with an announcement about renting a room. Either he stood, or hired someone. If I came across clients, I drove them to the hut and did not appear at the station again. If no one was caught during the day, he went out in the evening. It's a completely different clientele. If during the day - those who are passing through Moscow, then closer to the night, mostly men who bought prostitutes. In the evenings, I stood with an announcement right on the road that leads from the station. The man took the girl, put her in the car - and here I am with the apartment.

True, Aleksey Vitalyevich rented out living space not for a day, but for the most part for several hours. Who just needed to sleep, who needed to wash in the shower. At the same time, the owner himself was present in the apartment to keep order.

- There is another rule - how many came together, so many left together. And only together. Because little is. One will rob or kill another, and then they will hang all the dogs on me, because everything happened in my apartment.

At the station, among those who rent housing, a kind of trade union was formed. People know each other and help each other as much as possible.

- Such a union includes both "mothers" and pimps. Because when a client takes their girl, it will always be safer for them if they take her to me. “Mothers” even asked me to look after the girls ....

Aleksey Vitalievich rents an apartment for rent to random clients from a pensioner friend. He has been living somewhere in a village near Vladimir for several years, and rents out his Moscow apartment for the sake of adding to his meager pension.

Alexey Vitalievich pays the pensioner two hundred dollars a month. He lives on Avtozavodskaya. If he manages to rent an apartment "without days off" - that is, the whole month (it turns out, however, not always), his income is calculated elementarily: thirty days a month for thirty dollars. It turns out about nine hundred dollars. Of these, he gives two hundred to the owner of the apartment, and one and a half thousand rubles - for utilities and a telephone.

Our service is both dangerous and difficult

Thus, Alexey Vitalievich gets about twenty thousand rubles of net profit per month. But this money often has to be “extorted” from clients.

- Renting an apartment like that, you always take a risk. After all, not only couples in love are filming, but anyone.

Once Aleksey Vitalievich let two guys into the room (it was still in the old five-room apartment). One of them was constantly in the room - he seemed to be ill. The guys paid regularly, Alexei Vitalievich was not worried. Then one of them dropped out. And his friend crawled into the kitchen and "passed out." It turns out that he has a bullet hole just above the knee, and below the whole leg is blue: gangrene.

Aleksey Vitalyevich dragged the client out into the street and called an ambulance from the automatic machine. He pretended to be a passer-by so that the apartment would not be “shone”. And then some types called him a couple of times and demanded to extradite a certain Igorka, otherwise promising to "cut everyone to hell."

Or Aleksey Vitalyevich rented a room to a pair of refugees. And in a day there were already eight of them - the rest "came to visit." The guests flatly refused to pay: “There is no money.” And when the deliverer tried to drive them out, they took Alexei Vitalyevich and shoved his head into a glass kitchen cupboard. The result: fourteen stitches, imposed by the clumsy hand of the ambulance paramedic, and a fine given to the policemen who arrived at the noise of the fight ....

Here is such a business. And you won't be intimidated at all. After all, it is obvious that the so-called "decent" people are still unlikely to rent a room or apartment for a day. And from the "indecent" - what to take?