Translated material
Choose or lose
The state has taken on housing and communal services, citizens are still thinking about it
The results of this year for the Russian housing and communal services look very contradictory. On the one hand, the authorities are pleased to note the increased activity of citizens: more and more people are deciding how to manage their home. But on the other hand, there are still only a little more than half of the total number of “owner-owned” houses in Russia as a whole. Residents of the rest are waiting for the choice to be made for them. And of those who chose, not all of them did it of their own free will. Often, the services of a private management company or the creation of a homeowners' association (HOA) are imposed on residents by authorities or commercial organizations almost out of force - either for show in a report on the successes of the housing and communal services reform, or to make a profit.One of the main reasons for the passivity of citizens is the appalling state of the housing stock in our country: the volume of under-repairs is estimated at trillions of rubles. All this, if I may say so, must be accepted by apartment owners. And after that, operate and repair it at your own expense, as required by the Housing Code. Of course, in such a situation, few of the residents will agree to take over the management of the house, especially since often it is simply a question of unaffordable money: after all, poor people, as a rule, live in dilapidated houses. Only this year it was recognized at the highest level that the state has debts to its citizens for major repairs. This, perhaps, can be called the event of the year in the Russian housing and communal services sector.
Return the favor
The history of major repairs is long. In 1991, a federal law on the privatization of the housing stock was adopted. It states: by transferring the apartments into the ownership of their residents, the former owner, that is, the state, must cover all its obligations for home repairs, especially since it has been collecting money under the “overhaul” line from citizens for many years. And only after the obligations are fulfilled, the costs of operating the building are completely transferred to the new homeowners. Privatization proceeded at a rapid pace, but for many years there was no talk of any major repairs at the expense of the budget in Russia. Even in the richest city in the country - Moscow - the annual volume of major repairs was such that the number of dilapidated housing only increased from year to year. It is better to remain silent about other regions.
And with the entry into force of the new Housing Code in 2005, the obligation for major repairs in the state, and at all levels, was completely forgotten. Like, it is written that the owner is renovating - let him renovate. In essence, the reform of housing and communal services has reached a dead end: the federal government shifted responsibility for dilapidated housing to the regional government, the regional government complained about the lack of money, and the residents of the slums not only do not have enough money, but will never have it.
This year the debts were finally recognized. The Supreme Court, in response to a request from State Duma deputy Galina Khovanskaya, gave an unequivocal answer: until the former landlord repairs the house that has exceeded the standard operating life, these obligations cannot be imposed on the new owners. Now, in theory, in the event of a lawsuit between citizens and municipal authorities regarding the failure to carry out major repairs, the decision will be made in favor of the former. Just what will a court decision give if the authorities still can’t find money for repairs, especially in subsidized regions?
To solve this problem, the Federal Fund for Assistance to the Reform of Housing and Communal Services was created last summer. It is expected that the funds from the fund will be used to help regions resettle people from dilapidated housing and carry out major repairs. This is a very important event: the state not only recognized the debts, but also showed its willingness to pay them. Just the federal budget contribution to this fund is 250 billion rubles. -- looks more than modest compared to the cost of underrepairs throughout the country (according to experts, up to 10 trillion rubles). In addition, it will be very difficult for municipalities to receive federal money. A number of requirements were put forward to the applicants. The most controversial of them is that repairs using money from the fund will only be carried out on co-financing terms: at least 5% of the cost of major repairs must be paid by the apartment owners. According to Galina Khovanskaya, residents of dilapidated houses will not have such money. And the approach itself, the deputy believes, is fundamentally wrong: the state does not give a gift in order to demand conditions, but pays off debts.
However, the federal authorities’ position is unshakable: already at the first meeting of the supervisory board of the Housing and Communal Services Reform Fund, the head of the Ministry of Regional Development, Dmitry Kozak, said: “they won’t give money to the regions for no reason.” The idea of the federal authorities is to stimulate and accelerate the implementation of housing and communal services reform. Thus, one of the conditions for allocating funds to the region is that by 2011, at least 20% of apartment buildings in it should organize homeowners' associations (HOAs). The idea may be good, but it is difficult to implement. The reform has stalled due to the dilapidated "communal apartments", and money for repairs can only be obtained by making progress in reform. In such a situation, it may well happen that municipalities will force residents into HOAs by force or without their knowledge. Which often happens even now. The fact is that, according to the law, the decision on the method of managing the house is made at a general meeting of apartment owners. In many houses, municipalities remain among the owners - they own non-privatized housing.
Under these conditions, banks that intended to refinance issued mortgage loans through securitization were forced to attract investors with higher returns, which is not always economically feasible. Securitization transactions were postponed by most banks. Which for borrowers meant an increase in interest rates for using a mortgage loan. “We are already observing this trend in the market,” continues Sadovskaya. Following this, an international liquidity crisis began, the consequences of which were not long in coming in Russia.
And since they own it, it means they can both convene a meeting and push through the necessary decisions at them, because the strength of your vote depends on the size of your share of ownership in the house. In addition, voting can also be carried out in absentia - by delivering pieces of paper to the grandmothers living in the house, showing them where to check the boxes, thus achieving a quorum, and the decision is ready. Many people learn about such decisions after the fact. It's their own fault - they should have moved earlier.
Overhaul - only to responsible persons
The conditions for receiving money from the housing and communal services reform fund were criticized in many regions. Including in Moscow. The capital's authorities have already announced that they will not comply with the requirement for mandatory financial participation in the overhaul of apartment owners. There will not be a transition to 100 percent payment by Muscovites for housing and communal services in the near future - this is another key condition for the transition of communal services to market principles. In Moscow, they decided to allocate money from the city budget for major repairs and carry them out completely throughout the city by 2014. In seven years, according to the program already approved in the first reading by the Moscow City Duma, 13.7 thousand houses with a total area of 117.5 million square meters will be renovated. m - more than half of the total housing stock in Moscow. About 490 billion rubles are allocated for this, that is, almost twice as much as the federal center allocated for the entire country.
True, while refusing the conditions of the Housing and Utilities Reform Fund, the Moscow authorities themselves did not forget to put forward conditions for the citizens. In the capital's capital repair program it is written in black and white that priority is given to reconstructing houses in which HOAs have been created. Again the same logic: you first reform, and then we will give you money for repairs, without which the reform will not proceed.
After experts in the field of housing and communal services “went over” on this point of the program, the mayor’s office softened their position. At a meeting in the City Duma, First Deputy Mayor in the Moscow Government Pyotr Biryukov said that the main point in determining the priority of major repairs would not be the presence of an HOA in the house, but the technical condition of the house and the preparedness of design estimates for repairs. Even if this is true (and no one removed the clause about the benefits for HOAs from the program), it seems that Muscovites cannot escape the semi-forced “tesezhatsija” policy. After renovation, the Moscow authorities intend to transfer the houses only to “responsible owners.” In the mayor's office, they mean those who have created HOAs. Back in the summer, the Moscow government, by its resolution, outlined a plan to increase the number of homeowners' associations from the current modest 1.7 thousand to 30 thousand in seven years, that is, to cover almost the entire city with partnerships. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov shared his vision of the post-reform structure of housing and communal services in Moscow: already in 2008, all current DEZs will be corporatized and will become equal participants in the housing and communal services market. And their function will be reduced to the direct operation of houses. That is, citizens create a partnership that either manages the house itself, collects money and decides where to spend it, or hires a professional management company for this purpose. And the manager is already hiring the former DEZ as a contractor to carry out maintenance and repair work. If, of course, DEZ can withstand competition with private companies.
What to choose and what will be chosen
According to many experts, reform “from above” can lead to dire consequences. To begin with, let us recall how the possible methods of managing apartment buildings differ. The choice, as we have already said, is made by apartment owners at a general meeting.
According to the Housing Code, there are three such methods. Firstly, this is direct management of apartment owners. In this case, residents have maximum control over what happens in the house: all key decisions are made at a general meeting of owners. In addition, each owner signs an agreement with supplying organizations (heat, electricity, water) separately. That is, in theory, it will not suffer in any way due to non-paying neighbors. The main disadvantage of direct management is that it is difficult to gather the majority of the residents of the house on every occasion. And it is even more difficult to find a compromise between them. Therefore, this method is suitable for small houses with a small number of owners.
The second method is when apartment owners create a special non-profit organization to manage the building. For example - HOA. And then the HOA either directly signs contracts with operating and energy supply organizations, collects money for major repairs, and so on, or entrusts this to professional managers under an agreement. This form, ideally, is a kind of compromise between direct management, which requires high activity and responsibility of residents, and the good old DEZ, when you pay money without thinking too much, and only complain if there is a leak somewhere. Interested citizens in houses under HOAs can always check the efficiency of spending their funds (the procedure is quite transparent) or challenge, say, the need to erect a security post. Apathetic citizens, having voted once for the organization of an HOA, may forget about general meetings. It is this model that the state offers Russians as the optimal one.
Finally, the third way: managing a management company. This is when, at a general meeting, apartment owners simply vote for some LLC, often for a former DEZ, and give it the right to decide how much money to collect and what to spend it on. Of all three forms, this has the lowest level of control and participation of citizens in the management of their home. But there is a big plus: you don’t have to be active or study. They will do everything for you.
As it turns out, Russians prefer the latter option. According to a study by the Federal Antimonopoly Service, at the end of the first half of 2007, about a third of houses in Russian cities were managed by management organizations. In second place is direct control (about every tenth house). And HOAs, which are so promoted by authorities at all levels, were created in only 4.3% of the total number of apartment buildings.
The problem here is not only the lack of major repairs. A homeowners' association, for example, until recently was not easy to create. The registration of housing cooperatives was carried out by the Ministry of Justice in accordance with the law on non-profit organizations (NPOs). Meanwhile, this law, adopted in the wake of the “orange” revolutions, presupposes a ponderous bureaucratic system of registration and control. Fortunately, the State Duma realized that concerns about the subversive activities of non-profit organizations have nothing to do with HOAs. In November, an amendment was adopted, according to which homeowners' associations were removed from the law on non-profit organizations. And now to register they only need to register with the tax authorities. Other benefits for HOAs were also adopted this year. For example, in Moscow they were exempted from paying land tax.
It is possible that these and other relaxations will eventually become an incentive for the massive creation of HOAs, but it is doubtful. For example, you don’t have to pay land tax in Moscow. But the capital’s HOAs don’t have land either. Although, according to the Housing Code, the land under the house belongs to the owners of the apartments simply in fact, in Moscow and other large cities no one is in a hurry to register plots as shared ownership of residents. This is often due to the fact that it is not clear exactly how much land around the house needs to be given to the HOA. The historical boundaries of the plots of two neighboring houses may be completely different. This also depends on the time the house was built. Therefore, one HOA may own an entire playground, while the neighboring one may have only a flowerbed a meter wide. Conflicts during division are simply inevitable. The mayor of the capital, Yuri Luzhkov, solved the problem this way: he proposed to give away the land at a minimum, almost along the perimeter of the house. This definition, which sounds extremely vague, is also contained in the draft city law “On Land Use”, which is currently being considered by the Moscow City Duma. To cut HOA land holdings to a minimum means to deprive them of a significant share of the profit, which they could use to maintain and repair the house. After all, land is the most expensive thing in the capital now.
In such conditions, it is not yet possible to talk about real ones, created from below after a thoughtful decision by the HOA. And they must appear - this is the “party line”. This means that HOAs will appear, which from a legal point of view will be completely legal, but from an ideological point of view they will be fictitious, created by a decision from above. Not long ago, the large company Mirax Service announced that it would assist the city authorities in creating 300 HOAs in the Western District of Moscow and through them would receive 1.5 million square meters for management. m of housing stock. The love of the capital's authorities for large companies in the housing and communal services market has already caused a lot of rumors: deputy Galina Khovanskaya even states that she has information about an agreement between the mayor's office and three companies to divide up most of the market. “The unnatural monopoly of DEZ will eventually be replaced by the unnatural monopoly of private companies, which is even much more dangerous for residents than the existing house management system,” Khovanskaya believes.
Russians have practically no time left to decide how to manage their home. Until May 1, 2008, the state is obliged to hold competitions to select a management company in those buildings where residents have not yet decided. In Russia there are almost half of them. In some regions, competitions have already been announced, in others they will begin soon (in Moscow, for example, from January 1). And, unfortunately, as a study by the antimonopoly service shows, the authorities do not always choose building managers in a fair fight. At the end of the first half of 2007, only 1.3% of houses in Russian cities received house managers through competitions organized by municipalities. But every tenth house was given by local authorities to private owners without any competitions. It is not surprising that there are already plenty of stories about fraud in the housing and communal services market in our country.
There is only one way to reduce the risk: finally wake up and take an interest in what is happening in your home. By law, you can change a careless or ineffective building manager. This is, perhaps, one of the main advantages of the new housing and communal services system compared to Soviet DEZs, ZhEKs and REUs.