A nightmare in a humant-hill: residents of Balashikha turned out to be hostages of the authorities and builders

Julia Suntsova

The Aviators microdistrict in the north of Balashikha was originally planned as a quarter for military pensioners.

By 2011-2013, the Ministry of Defense completed the first stage of the residential complex there and began to issue apartments to military families who had served to preferential housing from the state, and veterans of military operations.

When handing out the keys to the defenders of the Motherland, they promised a railway station, a new polyclinic, a sports and recreation complex, the necessary number of preschool and educational institutions. At first, everything was like that – schools, kindergartens, a new medical center were being built...

But at some point, parochial commercial interests again outweighed. Another area of the nearest Moscow region is being turned into a humant-hills' area.

Now about 30 thousand inhabitants live in the village of Aviators. The social and transport infrastructure is heavily overloaded, despite the fact that it is being "developed". In the coming months, several thousand more military personnel will come here – sixteen 17-storey buildings are already being prepared for commissioning.

In the neighborhood of the military quarter, the group of companies "Airplane" digs pits for eight more 17-storey buildings. Here, in small-sized apartments, they want to settle beneficiaries under state renovation programs and migrants from dilapidated and dilapidated housing. Total – in total, the Aviators' microdistrict will be replenished by at least 18 thousand more residents. The district will turn into a whole city in terms of the number of inhabitants.

For the military, the sudden neighborhood with other beneficiaries was a complete surprise. The point building was dragged through quickly and silently. 

- Under the cover of the implementation of state programs, the administration of Balashikha and the developer GC "Airplane" are turning the area into a "chicken coop". It is written in the reports that the houses are needed by the displaced persons for renovation and displaced persons from dilapidated and dilapidated housing. In fact, it looks more like an ordinary commercial transaction. Only 13% of the apartments in the high-rise buildings of the "Airplane" will be transferred to the municipality under state programs. 87% of new apartments are pure commerce, the lion's share of these apartments will enter the open market, – says lieutenant colonel of the reserve and a resident of the microdistrict Nikolay Krasikov.

Even if you really need to resettle emergency and old houses, there is a much simpler and exactly the same cost for the budget solution.

Residents point to new buildings already built in the neighborhood, but not yet inhabited – for example, the residential complex "Pehra" or the residential complex "Izmailovsky Forest". It would be possible for all state migrants to buy apartments there, and not to put some tenants on the heads of others and not stick concrete jungles of economy class everywhere where it is possible and impossible. But the mayors did not even consider such quite reasonable proposals.

Eleven years ago, when it only became known about the densification of the Aviator microdistrict, developers and officials presented beautiful concepts of "integrated development of territories" to residents. In addition to kindergartens, schools, polyclinics and FOCA, they promised to expand the Balashikha highway, supplement it with interchanges, and in addition - to extend the railway line from the station "Balashikha" directly to the Aviators microdistrict.

Even then it was clear that the expanding neighborhood requires much more social facilities than was planned by the municipality. 

While waiting for thousands of new settlers, the residents of the microdistrict can already clearly imagine the scale of the urban collapse that is coming to them. 

People have a lot of complaints…

A decade later, 4 new kindergartens were actually built in the Aviator village. But this is already three times less today than is objectively necessary.

With a total capacity of these kindergartens of 525 places, they are already twice full today – 970 pupils attend them in total, and 350 more kids are waiting in line for places in the microdistrict. Where will the newly arrived children also have to go? They promise to build a fifth kindergarten for 220 places. But simple calculations show that the fifth and even the sixth kindergarten will not exhaust the problem of overcrowding. 

The neighborhood's schools are also bursting at the seams. Indeed, new schools No. 26 and a new 600-seat building were built to the existing school No. 30, but despite this, the entire need for a huge microdistrict in educational places is not closed. There are 4,089 children studying in two schools today instead of 2,500, and this is 63% more than the number of full-time places in these general education institutions. Together with the families of the new settlers, about 2,400 more students of different ages will arrive in the near future. No one knows where they will all study.

There are already an average of 35-40 people in school classes in the microdistrict. There are not enough desks, there is not enough space in the classroom, students are sometimes forced to lay out textbooks and notebooks on window sills! A hidden second shift has been introduced. Some of the students come to the third lesson, and the high school students are partially transferred to the remote! Tenth and eleventh graders of both schools study from home two days a week, as best they can. And this is on the eve of the final state exams! The school management calls it "experiments on the introduction of new teaching methods." And all in order to report that there is no second shift in the neighborhood…

The opening of a new medical center in the microdistrict was generally turned into a fiction.

Officials, as promised, really built and equipped a new hospital on Tretyaka St., 4. According to the statements of the city administration, they built it specifically for the new neighborhood. At the same time, the authorities simply took and closed the nearest old polyclinic No. 2 on Zarechnaya Street, 2. The dilapidated building is slowly turning into a "ghost".

Residents of districts 18-22a have lost a polyclinic within walking distance, first of all. Secondly, the entire flow of those released was redirected and reattached to a new hospital in the Aviators' neighborhood. Doctors and medical staff were simply transferred to a new building without expanding the staff. We have: in terms of the number of patients, the service area has doubled, and the number of medical workers has remained the same. Doctors and narrow specialists for patients have become even less accessible.

- It is impossible to make an appointment with specialized specialists and pediatric doctors. Getting a referral for ultrasound is a whole test.  The record, as it should be, opens two weeks in advance, but for all supposedly available dates, the same answer pops up: "There are no doctors available for recording." People are forced to go to appointments in paid clinics, but there are queues in them too! ,- says Julia Z.

Another problem is the inability to provide such a large number of residents of the district with work.

According to the standards of urban planning design of the Moscow region (as amended on December 30, 2022), "during the new construction of residential facilities, it is necessary to provide for the provision of places of employment from the estimated population: 50 percent - for the development of multi-storey apartment buildings." In other words, if, in a proportional recalculation for all residents of the city, half or more of the residents of the planned residential complex do not have enough jobs (employment data are taken from government agencies), it is simply impossible to coordinate the construction of such houses.

Judging by the fact that on weekday mornings almost the entire able-bodied part of the neighborhood lines up in long queues for minibuses, someone has neglected this norm ... or objective data on the projected number of residents have simply been manipulated.

Residents suspect that for 11 years of the existence of the Aviators microdistrict, the city administration has not submitted the proper documents to the architectural committee of the Moscow region. How else to explain that during all this time, houses that have been inhabited here for a whole decade have not appeared on the public cadastral map. Such slowness of officials in the end facilitates the coordination of sealing construction projects in the microdistrict.

Most residents of the Aviator village are forced to travel to work in Moscow, spending 4-5 hours a day on the road. And it's only 8 km from the MKAD. Officials initially planned to reduce the travel time to Moscow by extending the railway line from the station in Balashikha to the Aviators microdistrict itself.

- They promised that we would get by train from Letnaya Street to the Kursk railway station in 27-30 minutes, and they would walk at intervals of 15-20 minutes. What is happening in reality? There is no train, because there is no new railway line either. You go to the platform in Balashikha in a minibus through morning traffic jams for about an hour. This is if the minibus arrives immediately, but usually you also need to wait for it. In addition, you have to wait for 30-40 minutes for your turn on the minibus. In the morning and evening rush hours, they do not accommodate everyone. It is twice as fast to walk these two and a half kilometers on foot – it takes about 30 minutes. There are no direct trains from Balashikha to central Moscow, only to the Nizhny Novgorod station. There you have to change trains from one to another to the Kursk railway station. As a result, the travel time from the Aviator microdistrict to the Kursky railway station in Moscow is more than an hour and a half with transfers instead of the promised 30 minutes, - says Nikolai Krasikov.

The authorities have been feeding residents with breakfast about the train for the eleventh year. Active negotiations on this project, we can say, have stalled. Residents made a request to JSC "Russian Railways" and found out that the company refused the Balashikha administration's request to extend the branch line to the Aviator microdistrict and let the train to the new station. The reason was called "economic inexpediency" – according to the calculations of Russian Railways, passenger traffic will not recoup the costs of a new overpass at the desired speed.

Officials did not consider it necessary to inform people about this failure. In words, for some reason they continue to promise a railway connection.

This is not the end of the residents' troubles. Despite the monstrous overpopulation of the district, the municipality and the Council of Deputies recently agreed in the microdistrict on the transfer of three more huge plots of land from the general use category to the residential development zone. At the meetings, people asked the administration of Balashikha about plans for these wastelands, but received a false answer. The mayor's office told them that the land allegedly belongs to the Ministry of Defense, and this department does not report all its ideas to mere mortals. But the residents made a request to the Rosreestr and, according to the EGRN, no military department owns these plots, the administration of the Balashikha urban settlement has ownership rights to the land...

At all meetings with representatives of the administration, residents speak out against further development of the microdistrict with apartment buildings, at least until problems with social infrastructure, jobs, transport connectivity are resolved.

For this reason, apparently, public hearings began to take place somewhere far away, in foreign areas. Most residents of the neighborhood are not present at them (although they want to) and do not meet ads in local media.

People would like to have a park built on vacant lots instead of a felled grove or a recreational one. But secrecy on the part of mayors does not add optimism.

- Each new draft of the General Plan of Balashikha leads to a deterioration of conditions for residents of the northern part of Balashikha. All existing social facilities are a drop in the ocean due to overpopulation. Persistent neglect and disrespect for us, the residents – that's what we feel all these years. They can't hear us. Officials are much more enthusiastic when interacting with interested parties in commercial construction projects. In this field of activity, they have time at times more willingly and faster, - says a resident of the microdistrict Julia Ch.

In their collective letters to various authorities, residents are asking for a moratorium on new construction in the Aviators neighborhood, at least until current problems are resolved.