Translated material
Didn't come to the yard
The State Duma will try to protect HOAs from sabotage by officials
Numerous complaints from homeowners' associations (HOA) about the impossibility of registering ownership of land plots under apartment buildings will force State Duma deputies to once again take up the task of amending housing legislation. The chairman of the State Duma Committee on Civil, Criminal, Arbitration and Procedural Legislation, Pavel Krasheninnikov, said yesterday that the delimitation of rights to these lands remains almost the only “pain point” of the housing reform. “Officials are not too keen to establish the boundaries of the areas on which apartment buildings are located,” the deputy summarized voters’ complaints.It is noteworthy that legislators remembered the problems of associations of apartment owners in exercising rights to the territory adjacent to their houses five years after the Housing Code came into force, which launched the housing reform. Actually, this event became the reason for a meeting between one of the ideologists of the new housing policy, Mr. Krasheninnikov, and the press. It was the housing complex, according to the deputy, that made it possible to form a certain layer of average owners in the country in a short period of time. Mr. Krasheninnikov recalled that formally, housing legislation secured for residents of condominiums the right of ownership both directly to apartments and to shares in the total area of the entire building and land plots within the boundaries of the development.
The State Duma is confident that children's and sports grounds in local areas are protected by law, but in practice homeowners are simply unable to control the use of courtyards, since they cannot formalize their right to this land. “Municipal authorities must, based on citizens’ statements, determine the boundaries of these areas. But in large cities, the establishment of plot boundaries is delayed for many months,” the State Duma complains. And the larger the city, the more problems homeowners' associations have with land registration. “The price of the issue here is much higher,” said Mr. Krasheninnikov, clearly referring to Moscow.
Let us recall that it was the metropolitan authorities, complaining about the impossibility in conditions of dense development to provide “everyone with a solid area for living,” who initially announced their intention to transfer into the ownership of HOAs exclusively the lands “under the sole” of apartment buildings. In addition, according to representatives of initiative groups of Muscovites, all attempts by homeowners associations to formalize the right to the adjacent territory are faced with bureaucratic obstacles and sabotage. As Dmitry Kataev, co-chairman of the Housing Solidarity movement, told Vremya Novostei yesterday, so far only a few partnerships have managed to register their plots. “A couple of plots a year that we manage to register are a drop in the ocean,” he complained that the process of surveying courtyard areas has not gotten off the ground. According to Mr. Kataev, there are “holes in the housing legislation that allow officials not to comply with its fundamental norms.” “They need to be shut up. Five amendments to the Housing, Land and Town Planning Codes would be enough to start this process,” he is confident.
In Moscow, it is possible to achieve registration of a site not based on the blind area of buildings, but also taking into account courtyard areas, only through the court. Today, this is already an established practice of struggle between townspeople and officials, Tatyana Lykova, an expert at the Institute of Urban Economics Foundation, told Vremya Novostei. The foundation's experts are not inclined to blame the stalling of housing reform in this part only on legislation, considering the main problem to be “organizational difficulties” and “inertia” of officials.
However, judging by the words of Pavel Krasheninnikov, the situation with the registration of land plots for apartment buildings has reached the stage where federal legislators are ready to spur on municipal authorities. Krasheninnikov said that State Duma deputies intend to resolve disputes between homeowners associations and officials on the issue of delimitation of rights to local areas at the legislative level. However, the deputy did not specify the timing for introducing the relevant amendments. State Duma deputy Galina Khovanskaya, considered one of the leading experts in the field of housing policy, told Vremya Novostei that she had not yet seen such amendments. However, in her opinion, the current housing legislation comprehensively guarantees the right of homeowners in apartment buildings to courtyard land plots. “There are regulatory documents of the Russian government that approve the procedure for calculating the size of these territories. “We have everything, we just don’t have the desire,” said Ms. Khovanskaya. In her opinion, on the part of the authorities of individual cities this is “sabotage, which is not regulated by law.”