apartments for Muscovites will be sold through connections http://www.izvestia.ru/moscow/article3096565/ I don’t know whether the project described in the article actually exists, but if it does, it’s really something. For example, the plan is to gradually shift Muscovites away from buying apartments and toward renting them — like in the rest of the world. To do this, the city intends to bring the semi-legal rental market out of the shadows. Right now in Moscow, around 120,000 residents own a second apartment and rent it out, but only 5,000 of those are rented out officially and declared for tax purposes. The plan is to create something like a state-run rental agency that would find housing for Muscovites. Yeah. Sure. And 115,000 people will suddenly lose their minds and rush to pay income tax on their rental income. What will really happen is that they’ll create yet another useless state unitary enterprise (a government-owned commercial entity in Russia), give it office space, staff, and salaries. Another idea is to promote the construction of rental apartment buildings: for example, to provide investors with land plots in exchange for a commitment not to sell the apartments in newly built buildings right away, but to rent them out to Muscovites for a certain period instead. Unsuccessful attempts to build rental housing have been going on for a long time already. No sane investor is going to build them under current conditions. A 100-square-meter apartment is sold for 300,000. It rents for 15,000 a year. So you can get the money right away, or you can get it over 20 years. Question: which option do you think investors will choose? The most controversial proposal in the upcoming program is to require investors building commercial housing to reserve part of the apartments in a building under construction for sale exclusively to Muscovites. It’s not even worth commenting on — it’s ridiculous. What on earth is going on in Moscow City Hall? Who comes up with all this? Don’t they even have a calculator?
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