The construction mafia is lobbying the transformation of "offices with toilets" into the housing

Lyudmila Butuzova

Quarantined senators held special online hearings to protect the rights and guarantees of citizens living and acquiring all kinds of “apartments” illegally built in apartment buildings across the country. The author of the idea was Oleg Melnichenko, Chairman of the Committee on the Federal Structure, Regional Policy, Local Government and Northern Affairs.

“Apartments” today occupy a significant part of the market for new buildings, while in the legislation there is no such concept, ”said the senator.

We may recall that the Federation Council has long developed a draft federal law establishing the legal status of “apartments” and buildings with “apartments” as new types of real estate. It freezes, as it essentially justifies the unauthorized actions of developers to redevelop residential buildings, and suggests retroactively legitimizing violated norms and requirements of SNIPs. The lobbyists’ argument about the growing “demand for such premises” and their confident competition at prices with apartments in high-rise buildings does not stand up to criticism. However, it is currently not possible to register in apartments (by law, these are non-residential premises), which, according to senators, “creates difficulties for all market participants.”

The head of the State Duma Committee on Housing and Utilities Galina Khovanskaya and deputy Sergei Pakhomov criticized the bill, reports RIA Novosti . According to Khovanskaya, the idea of changing the status of apartments to residential and allowing registration there will only legitimize fraud and corruption. The deputy noted that “developers bypass the entire approval process, all the requirements of the law in relation to residents and residential visits. In this case, they save money. (...) These are non-residential objects. And they are not covered by all those benefits at utility rates that residents have. Because they are naturally charged higher rates for the provided utility services. They have a different tax. This is a completely different scheme. "

Pakhomov said that there is a problem with the apartments, but "we need seriously work on this bill".

Meanwhile, the senators, without hesitation, sent the project to the government and hope for its approval without noise and dust. The fight against the pandemic seemed like the right moment for this. City defenders, experts, municipal deputies are outraged. “Instead of an immediate cessation of mass construction, a ban on the use of unsuitable premises for housing, it is proposed to further aggravate the results of the“ strategy ”aimed at making profit at any cost,” the public said in an appeal to the government.

The consequences of such a humane step as the legislative approval of “social” housing of 8 square meters in size and the mass registration of citizens in these pantries, told “NI” lawyer Stanislav Stankevich.

“If senators can drag this defiant unsanitary, antisocial bill and legalize the mass residence of citizens in unsuitable premises, then given the large number of illegally constructed apartments, this will be another confirmation of the“ real ”concern of officials about the health and safety of the population of the Russian Federation,” he said. - The next challenge to society has been thrown for the sake of the construction mafia. It’s special cynicism that this happens during the period of the coronavirus epidemic, when the self-isolating population is simply suffocating from the re-consolidation of their cities, and in Moscow people don’t even have the opportunity to fulfill the sanitary norm of 100 meters. You leave the entrance and bury your forehead into the wall of another house. And these are still flowers. In connection with another attempt to legalize almost landless "Shanghai", at the crucial moment of a pandemic, lawmakers are going to dump hundreds of thousands of unexpected, unexpected patients who are capable of completely paralyzing an already "optimized" medicine.

According to Stankevich, the time of the pandemic revealed obvious things that were deliberately hushed up by the Moscow authorities. First of all, the fact that the construction of non-residential buildings, not designed for permanent residence of citizens, requires the same amount of urban resources as residential buildings. But there are no additional resources, which means that the "new settlers" need them to take from the indigenous citizens. Another important moment for epidemiological safety: the limitation of the number of people per hectare of urban development has been discarded as unnecessary, closely standing multi-storey buildings — living centers of the epidemic — are being erected at microscopic sites. Mass self-isolation of the population in such nurseries is more than a dubious precaution.

“The question is as follows,” says lawyer Stanislav Stankevich. “Either we suppress obscurantism and inhumane decisions on the construction and legalization of apartments that are not provided by hospitals, clinics, schools, kindergartens, or land plots that do not meet sanitary requirements. , or we will pay for it with our lives and health. It must be remembered that the right to a favorable environment is guaranteed to us by the Constitution, and not by pieces of paper that are written on the lap of various lobbyists.

We may also add that the bill, which proposes to use non-residential premises as housing stock, is handed to the government anew, despite the fact that the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation has already identified legally unremovable obstacles to turning apartments into residential apartments.