Resurveyed and chewed: renovators stole a courtyard and a square from Muscovites

Lyudmila Butuzova

There are entire neighborhoods that abandoned the program back in 2017. People live in peace, in full confidence that they have protected their homes and yards. Not! If the renovators really need it, they will still find how to deceive, take away, destroy and present this robbery as a good deed "in the interests of the city".

Exactly this is happening now in the Danilovsky district of the capital, in a small microdistrict on Peresvetov Lane. Several of the local five-story buildings left the renovation in unison at the very beginning. No scandals, no frenzied meetings and a feverish collection of signatures, that's all. ... “We don’t need any improvement, we have good things here too -“ Stalinist ”apartments, nature is in the yard. You will leave the entrance and go straight to the square, ”an 80-year-old woman, who can’t come to her senses, told Novye Izvestia: how is it - all this happened yesterday, but today it’s gone. There is nothing left of the Victory Square, planted in 1945 by Muscovites who returned from the war, all the trees - 150 pieces - were cut down in one night on August 26. The day before, on the 25th, and also at night, the entire courtyard near house No. 7, building 1 was fenced off by unknown persons with a construction fence up to the windows. And, as if to comfort the shocked residents, they decorated their building with a poster "Building our beloved city".

The quiet life on Peresvetov Lane is over. Now there are rallies, protests, demands to the authorities to return the land and punish the invaders every day. Residents on the barricades, if you can call it that 10 meters of road between the house and the fence, blocked by the same heavy construction equipment. Squeezed from all sides do not give up...

“Everything that preceded these events is very similar to a military operation to seize the enemy’s territory”, - said Klim Likhachyov, a lawyer and representative of the Moscow group for the protection of the rights of Muscovites in the Moscow City Duma during the implementation of the renovation program, who visited the site of hostilities. - In Moscow, with infill buildings under the guise of renovation, they crawl into any courtyard, this is already the norm. But this is not just an ordinary situation. Secretly from the residents, a plan was developed and implemented to take away land from an apartment building, which does not come into contact with the renovation in any way, and the city's "common lands", which officials are so fond of privatizing, it does not have. There is a courtyard and a public garden on the land, formed by the Soviet authorities during the construction of the house. It belongs to the residents, just like their apartments. All that is later chewed off is illegal seizure of property. How to disguise it? They invented a method - Plot INTERLOCKING. The same robbery in broad daylight, but kind of civilized if you surround it with democratic procedures. For example, arrange a "public discussion" on the Active Citizen without notifying the residents, draw for them a "voluntary consent" to the weaning of the site, and that's it - fly in and build up quickly until the residents wake up.

The residents of Peresvetova Pereulok, 7, building 1 learned that they had an interchange and electronic hearings in this case when they were already left without land and with a construction fence in place of the park.

- Nobody informed us and did not stutter about the upcoming construction site, - confirms local resident Dmitry Zanevsky. - I came across an ad by accident. There was a piece of paper on the door “There is an electronic hearing in your area. We will only discuss interleaving. "It is not clear what it is and why electronic hearings are needed. In our area, half of the pensioners, not all of them even have the Internet, but whoever has it, try to guess how to technically perform a vote. I myself made my way with a creak - through registration on state services, through problems with authorization and failures on the Aktivniy grazhdanin (Active Citizen)... Left in the section "remarks" his opinion on the "interleaving". It was somehow anxious that the idea could turn into a construction site. Later I looked: 250 people from all over the district voted, and we all received a standard answer: “Comments regarding construction are not relevant to this discussion. Your review has not been accepted". In short, they let the fog go. There was also a pandemic, the month of May - people were in self-isolation. This time was specially chosen so as not to conduct a normal discussion...

But the main insidiousness, of course, is that residents were not warned even about online hearings, and even more so about the frauds that it presents. Voting in electronic form is sharpened in such a way that if one of the residents does not participate in it, then his vote is automatically considered "for". One can imagine the rage of the deceived people who, as it were, agreed to "demarcate" their territory and voluntarily transferred 2,000 square meters of land occupied by green spaces for construction.

Collective petitions to the authorities - to the council and the prefecture - demanding to cancel the hearings and return the land, caused such a reaction from officials that it infuriated people even more. “They say: “Nothing can be done... The renovation has come to you, and you yourself voted for it”, - the residents vied with each other. - They also advised to read the news on the regional website, then, they say, everyone will be aware of what is happening. Only a big noise made the officials finally arrive at the scene and somehow explain to the people.

About fifty people gathered from the surrounding houses, stood with posters "No construction site" and "Power, hear us!"...

There were almost the same number of riot policemen and the National Guard. Protected the municipal authority in the person of the deputy. Head of the Council Sergei. Potapkin and the representative of the Renovation Fund Roman Zeliba, who immediately warned that they were against extremist appeals on the posters, but were ready for a constructive dialogue ...

- So, "constructively", everything has passed, - housewife Rita seethes with indignation. - People from their corner shout: "Cancel the illegal hearings", "Return the stolen land!". They seem to have a poor hearing, they talk from their hiding place: "We will provide minimum inconvenience and maximum support for residents during construction...". They supported us right away - the car had not yet driven away, the last trees were being cut down in our yard.

From August 25 and literally in a week, the green square turned into a torn up construction site. Change houses have been delivered, heavy equipment is constantly working, concrete blocks are everywhere. Shock work. And the most interesting thing is that you can't guess who was so impatient about it. Only at the end of August, on the official website of the mayor's office, a message appeared that in the Danilovsky district they began to build a house under the renovation program, the address of the object is Peresvetov lane, property 5. The customer is the renovation fund, the developer is MNIITEP JSC, the designer is Mosproekt 3. The project was presented by the head of the Moscow Construction Department, Rafik Zagrutdinov. The building is being constructed according to an individual project and will be a three-section residential building of variable number of storeys (11-12 floors). The facades will be finished with artificial stone tiles, air conditioner boxes will be installed, balconies will be glazed. Trees and shrubs will be planted in the local area, lawns and flower beds will be laid out. The new building will house an underground car park. The most important thing! The house will have 161 apartments - 63 one-room, 78 two-room and 20 three-room, with a total area of 9517.8 square meters. A simple operation on the calculator makes you doubt that such a luxurious house, where the average floor area of an apartment is 59 squares, is intended for immigrants from miserable five-story buildings and that it was for them that all these manipulations with the seizure of land on Peresvetov Lane were arranged. Residents generally go crazy from the suspicion that their favorite square was cut down for commercial development, and not at all for renovation, as their brains are fooled.

“It is quite possible that there is a commercial interest in the project”, - says lawyer Klim Likhachyov. - The situation in Moscow now is such that the needs of renovation can justify any dubious operation with the land, up to the seizure of playgrounds, if it is beneficial to the developer. There are no restraining instruments. Over the four years of the program, not a single regulatory document has appeared in the mayor's office to prevent the construction of commercial housing under the guise of renovation. And as long as such a freedom exists, everything that lies badly will be grabbed.

And what should the residents of Peresvetov Lane do now? How to return the land and get rid of unwanted construction, if it seems that everything is against them and unravel the intrigue that the best bureaucratic minds have woven, is not so easy. I would like to come up with some universal way to restore justice. But it seems to be gone. We will have to embark on the warpath that thousands of Muscovites have already followed after clashes with swindlers who are taking away any property that "lies badly".

- Start with the collection of signatures, and the more there are, the heavier the weight on the more often your scales, - advised the residents of the Moscow City Duma deputy Pavel Tarasov, promising deputy support all the way for their just cause. - Then lawsuits to cancel electronic voting and recognition the results of the demarcation are falsified, if you are lucky, - the restoration of the boundaries of the land plot by court, the expulsion of the developer from the seized territory (also by the court, he is unlikely to leave voluntarily)...

I don't know how inspired the residents of Peresvetov Lane were by the future trials of their enemies, but it wouldn't hurt to sue for every tree cut down in the park and for moral damage to people who are forced to breathe not oxygen, but construction dust. Let the renovators hang themselves from boredom in these endless courts.

True, more often than not, melancholy attacks Muscovites ... But sometimes, if you stick with your horn and do not retreat, you can return the property to its rightful place.