It’s election season again, which means that once more, in our own apartment building entrances and elevators, we’ll be stared at by the kindly eyes of United Russia party members, as if to say: "What, you thought this was your entrance? No, this entrance is mine."
Is there an advertising board in your building entrance? Almost certainly.
Did you give your consent for it to be installed? There’s a 146% chance you didn’t.
Many people believe that district housing maintenance offices, local authorities, or the company servicing the elevator have the right to put up advertising in our building entrances and profit from us. That is not the case. An advertising board can only appear if a general meeting of your building’s residents approves it and signs a contract with a company that will pay you for advertising in your entrance and elevator. The general meeting must approve both the contract format and the price for placing the ads.
If you were not at such a meeting, it can mean only one thing: the advertising in your building entrance has been placed illegally, and the money from it is most likely not being used for your building’s needs.
Very often, residents’ lack of awareness in matters like this works to the advantage of management companies—they can use this money however they like and avoid reporting on it.
The corrupt business of turning our building entrances and elevators into advertising space has become so widespread in major cities that the Anti-Corruption Foundation and our RosZhKH project decided to create a special service for you: http://fbk.info/lift/ .
Remove advertising from your building entrance in three simple steps: fill out the form; copy the prepared complaint; go to the prosecutor’s office website, paste the text of the complaint into the form on the site, and send it.
Look how well it works. We submitted several complaints ourselves and received responses. In every case, the advertising was removed.
Give it a try—you’ll succeed. Water does not flow under a lying stone, and all sorts of housing-and-utilities crooks take advantage of our inaction to profit from us.