Translated material
Problem 2014
A year ago, Sochi received the right to host the Winter Olympics
Last weekend, Sochi celebrated a year since the historic night of July 5, 2007 . That night, at the 119th session of the International Olympic Committee, beating Austrian Salzburg and South Korean Pyeongchang, Sochi received the title of capital of the XXII Olympic Winter Games and XI Winter Paralympic Games in 2014. Then everyone waited with bated breath for the moment when IOC President Jacques Rogge would turn over a small cardboard rectangle and the name of the winner could be read. He turned it over, and everyone read: Sochi-2014...Celebrating the anniversary of the victory, the Sochi 2014 festival was held at the resort. The venue of the event was the same Theater Square, where a year ago people were waiting for the IOC decision. Outstanding athletes and famous artists performed again. But the organizers of the event failed to gather the full square of people, as was the case a year ago. Official version: bad weather interfered. But one cannot help but notice another reason: over the past year, Sochi residents have completely gotten rid of the euphoria that the city experienced while in the heat of the fight for the right to host the Olympics.
Of course, the residents of the resort understand that the result of the upcoming transformations associated with unprecedented investments in the development of one city in the history of the country - more than $12 billion - can only be assessed in 2014. But for Sochi residents living now, the result of their city’s victory in the pre-Olympic competition was processes that suddenly began at the resort and painfully affected all the townspeople.
If we summarize the reasons that have already caused a sharp decline in the quality of life at the resort, which, by the way, has always been higher than in other Russian cities, then the Sochi residents have three main problems: an uncontrolled rise in prices, outpacing inflation rates in the country as a whole; a wild construction boom that has reached such proportions that in Sochi everyone now lives next to construction sites; reduction due to the first two reasons of the traditional resort sector in Sochi, which for decades provided work for most of the local population.
Already on the afternoon of July 5, 2007, the title of the capital of the 2014 Olympics came back to haunt Sochi residents and vacationers in the city at that moment with the rise in price of everything sold in the resort’s markets. The new price tags were simply shocking: cherries - 150 rubles. per kilogram, tomatoes - 100 rubles, potatoes - 30... Particularly surprising were the prices for greens, which are not transported to Sochi from afar and which in the Sochi humid subtropics themselves, without much effort from gardeners, rush out of the ground in powerful bushes. A bunch of several measly sprigs of parsley or dill, which had cost no more than 5 rubles the day before, now cost ten rubles. “What do you want,” the market women shouted to the angry customers. “We now have an Olympic city!”
The traders were right - they inflated prices based on the harsh Olympic reality. The head of the consumer market and services department of the Sochi administration, Andrei Nikonchuk, described this reality as follows: “Our fruits and vegetables are sold mainly by visitors renting living space in Sochi, but due to the city gaining the status of the capital of the Olympics, the price of rental housing overnight rose to 1.5 --3 thousand rub. for a one-room apartment per day...” That is, according to the official, the food market was drawn into the inevitable process of rising prices for everything that is bought and sold at the resort.
Why did the fact that Sochi became the Olympic capital lead to an increase in prices? Nothing has changed in the city: there are no new roads, no new sewerage, and the lights in houses are still turned off almost every day due to accidents and network overloads? Real estate market analysts are confident that the rise in real estate prices in Sochi, which, along with other factors, also stimulates the rise in price of everything else, is not caused by what is, but only by expectations of what will happen. That is, in advance Sochi became the best, and therefore the most expensive, city in the country.
For example, before the decision was made to hold the Olympics in Sochi, the cost of one square meter in the “House by the Arboretum” residential complex, which is being built by the M-Industry company, was in the range of $2,460-$3,800, but already on July 20, 2007, these the same meters were sold for 3300-4990 dollars. Over the year, all Sochi real estate has risen in price by an average of 50%, and the growth of its value, as analysts believe, will continue at the same rapid pace. Because after Sochi’s victory in the fight for the right to host the Olympics, the demand for housing in this city began and continues to grow. Wealthy people in the country began to invest money in Sochi real estate as the most profitable instrument for preserving capital. But at the same time, few people want to live in Sochi now: new buildings that have already been commissioned and sold out stand at the resort as if they were dead.
The cost of land plots has also increased more than one and a half times in Sochi over the year. There was already a precedent when one company, fighting at an auction with competitors for the right to obtain a small plot of land for construction in the center of the resort, paid a million dollars for each hundred square meters. The average price of one hundred square meters in Sochi is already about 400-500 thousand dollars. That is, Sochi is among the cities that are most attractive to investors involved in the construction of luxury residential complexes.
So, in parallel with the Olympic construction, which will affect only two territories in the Adler region - the environs of Krasnaya Polyana and the Lower Imeretinsk lowland, another grandiose construction project will take place throughout Sochi. Moreover, unlike the construction of Olympic facilities, which has not yet begun, this parallel development has already unfolded, turning the life of Sochi residents into a living hell. In the Central area of the resort, every 100-200 meters there are fences enclosing construction sites. Machinery rumbles, huge dump trucks squeeze through the narrow streets, steaming up the steep climbs. The city is constantly covered in smog and cement dust.
The last time Vladimir Putin, as president, communicated directly with the people, the question from Sochi was precisely about this: will large-scale Olympic construction scare off vacationers? Mr. Putin said that the Olympic construction will not scare vacationers away from Sochi, and in general, everything that is being planned in Sochi, on the contrary, is designed to bring more vacationers here. Maybe after 2014, when everything is over, this city will truly be a dream. But now Sochi residents, most of whom are employed in the guest service industry, are complaining that fewer and fewer vacationers are coming. True, official statistics report an increase in the flow, but at the same time they consider everyone who sets foot on the resort’s land to be a vacationer in Sochi: a nonresident builder, a businessman who arrived in the city on business, and even those who, upon arriving at the Sochi airport, immediately goes to Abkhazia.
The well-being of the vast majority of Sochi residents directly depends on the number of resort guests. The local population has no other sources of income other than serving vacationers (mostly guest workers work on construction sites in the city). Rising prices and a simultaneous reduction in income, the transformation of the city into one large construction site, which, which is quite obvious, will last another five years, are beginning to provoke an exodus of the indigenous population. Seeing no prospects in their city, Sochi residents, especially those over 40 years of age, sell their apartments and move to other regions, where the money received for Sochi square meters will be enough for both a new apartment and a tolerable life for a long time. Five-story buildings in Sochi microdistricts are increasingly covered with homemade advertising “sheets” with sale notices visible from afar.
So the newly elected mayor of the resort, Vladimir Afanasenkov, at one of his meetings with voters, honestly warned the city that an improvement in the situation (this meant everything: construction projects, traffic jams, water supply, etc.) would happen by 2014. And in the near future, as the then mayoral candidate admitted, “it will only get worse.”