The figures announced today by Kozak show that the so-called “major repairs fee” is doubly absurd in its current form.
Every apartment owner is paying for a promise: “we’ll do your building’s major overhaul in about 25 years, but in the meantime we’ll use your money to repair someone else’s building.” In Moscow, for example, that’s about 1,000 rubles a month for a 70-square-meter apartment.
Let’s not even get into how much this resembles the “Stalin loan bonds” (state bonds that Soviet citizens were effectively forced to buy), because there is a 100% chance we will never see any major repairs, and by then the people who made the promises will be long gone.
Let’s take a look at how the money is being spent:
They collected 97 billion rubles and spent 25 billion. The rest is sitting, at best, in deposits, but more likely just in bank accounts. The money is quietly burning away through inflation and rising prices for construction materials and labor.
So the question is: why the hell are you chasing us around shouting “pay up” and posting notices on doors saying “these apartments are behind on major repairs payments” if you can only spend a quarter of what you collect? People are paying dutifully — the collection rate is 77% — but what for?
And even “spent” is clearly an exaggeration. That total includes money that was “stolen” and money that was “squandered.” I strongly doubt that even half of those 25 billion rubles actually went toward real major repairs in residential buildings.
So what this means is that, during a time of crisis, 72 billion rubles have been taken from Russian households in order to do absolutely nothing with them. Wonderful, just wonderful. It’s not as if people could have figured out how to spend that money themselves — on food, for example. Or clothes for their children.
By the way, the absolute size of these collections — 97 billion rubles a year — shows that the whole country has been worked up over nonsense. Officials wring their hands and say that without a special major repairs levy, there will be no overhauls and all the buildings in the country will fall apart. And at the same time, Putin allocates even more money to his son-in-law: here, have this for your business at laughably low interest.
No one is offering us major repairs at laughably low interest rates — they demand the money up front.
In the beautiful Russia of the future, we will abolish this nonsense. First you get the major overhaul — financed through a loan backed by state guarantees — and then for 25 years you pay a little more for housing and utility services, while living in a decent building. Not like now, when you pay for 25 years first and then go chasing shadows.
In other words, the way it should be: first you receive the service, then you pay for it.