Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has approved the state programme for Affordable and Comfortable Housing and Utility Services to Russian Citizens.
The main objectives of the programme are to provide more affordable housing and better utility services to individuals, including in the context of state obligations to provide housing to specific categories of the population, and to provide better quality and more reliable housing/municipal utility services to the population.
The programme includes the following sub-programmes: Creation of Favourable Conditions for Affordable and Comfortable Housing for Russian Citizens; “Creation of Favourable Conditions for Top-Quality Housing/Municipal Utility Services for Russian Citizens”; “Ensuring the Implementation of the State Programme.” The draft programme also includes the federal targeted programme Housing for 2011-2015 and the federal targeted programme Pure Water for 2011-2017. There are plans to draft the federal targeted programme Housing for 2016-2020.
The objectives of the state programme are as follows:
Ensuring the commercial use of land plots for the purpose of economy-class housing construction;
Creating conditions for the active involvement of non-profit associations of tenants and home-owners and individual developers in housing construction;
Promoting the introduction of new, modern, energy efficient and resource saving technologies in the sphere of housing construction and the manufacture of construction materials used in housing construction;
Developing financial programmes for housing construction loans and mortgages, and for the construction of the municipal utilities infrastructure;
Issuing more affordable mortgages to individuals;
Ensuring the creation of a housing-rental market and providing additional non-profit housing for low-income groups;
Relocating residents from closed administrative-territorial entities;
Relocating tenants from rundown housing recognised as such as of January 1, 2012;
Fulfilling state obligations to provide housing to specific categories of individuals under federal legislation; providing housing and state support in the sphere of housing purchases to young families;
Creating conditions for expanded renovations and overhauls and housing modernisation for the purpose of providing more comfortable and more energy efficient housing;
Ensuring more cost-effective, better-quality and more reliable utility supplies, including through long-term private investment;
Creating incentives for the more frugal and cost-effective use of utility services by individuals;
Providing the population with safe drinking water, as stipulated by sanitary epidemiological regulations;
Attaining optimal occupancy levels in which the average number of rooms in an occupied space corresponds to the number of persons/tenants living there;
Creating a housing-rental market and providing additional non-profit housing for low-income individuals;
Reducing the average cost per square metre of housing on the primary market, with due consideration for the “Construction” deflation index for the appropriate year (as a percentage of the 2012 level) by 20% until 2018;
Increasing the share of individuals who can buy or rent the required housing on the market or build private homes using their own assets and loans;
Ensuring compliance of residential structures with modern energy efficiency requirements, environmental standards, as well as the requirements of specific population categories, including families with many children, senior citizens, people with disabilities, etc.;
Increasing the number of Russian citizens’ satisfied with housing and municipal utility services standards;
Reducing the losses during production, transportation and allocation of utility resources to European Union standards.
Deadline for implementing the state programme: 2013-2020 (First stage: 2013-2015; second stage: 2016-2017; third stage: 2018-2020).
The programme stipulates construction of economy-class housing and infrastructure facilities on commercial land plots adjacent to major cities, as well as on unused or inefficiently used land plots allotted to state organisations. There are plans to reduce housing mortgage interest rates and to increase the annual volume of loans to 868,000 loans in 2020, to provide subsidized mortgage rates for specific categories of buyers, including young families and public sector employees, and to expand the affordable residential rental market. By 2020, the programme calls for 10% of all newly built housing to be designated for rentals.
