Rosa Vihavainen Homeowners’ Associations in Russia after the 2005 Housing Reform Kikimora Publications/2009 ISBN 978-952-10-5148-7 ISSN 1455-481X ISBN 978-952-10-5150-0 PDF at http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/ © Aleksanteri Institute and the Author Cover design: Vesa Tuukkanen Gummerus Printing 2009 Homeowners’ Associations in Russia after the 2005 Housing Reform Contents LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 9 1. INTRODUCTION 11 1.1. Housing and Homeowners’ Associations in Post-Socialist Russia 13 1.2. Homeowners’ Associations in Civil Society 18 1.3. Homeowners’ Association as a Common-Pool Resource Regime 24 1.4. Social Capital in Homeowners’ Associations 29 1.5. Outline of the Book 36 2. HOUSING IN THE SOVIET UNION 37 2.1. Building the Soviet Housing System 37 2.2. Housing Conditions and Housing Administration in the 1920s and 1930s 42 2.3. The ‘Stick and Carrot’ Policy and the Right to Housing 48 2.4. Cooperative Housing 53 2.5. Housing Cooperatives in the Later Soviet Period 56 2.6. Khrushchev’s Housing Reform 59 2.7. Impact of the Soviet Period on the Present Situation 66 3. HOUSING AFTER THE SOVIET UNION 69 3.1. Housing Privatisation and Other Reforms in the 1990s 69 3.2. The New Housing Code 79 3.3. Housing Management Reform 86 3.3.1. Comparison of the Three Management Alternatives 92 3.3.2. Practical Situation and Challenges Facing Homeowners’ Associations 97 3.4. Housing in St. Petersburg 102 3.5. Housing Movements and Associations 108 3.6. House Committees and Other Informal Housing Management Organisations 116 3.7. Conclusions 119 5 HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATIONS IN RUSSIA AFTER THE 2005 HOUSING REFORM 4. HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATIONS’ MANAGEMENT AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 122 4.1. Data and Research Approach 122 4.2. Establishment of the Association 129 4.3. Membership and Social Structure of the Association 136 4.4. Non-Payment and Other Disagreements 139 4.5. Decision-Making 151 4.6. Participation and the Soviet Legacy 161 4.7. Social Relations and Informal Participation 168 4.8. Conclusions 174 5. HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATIONS’ RELATIONS WITH OTHER ACTORS 177 5.1. Property and Land Registration Disputes 178 5.2. Technical Problems and Relations with Private Companies 189 5.3. Maintenance Practices 196 5.4. Cooperation with Outside Actors and Relations with the Media 199 5.5. Privatisation and the Common Property 206 5.6. Homeowners’ Associations and Gated Communities 211 5.7. Conclusions 214 6. CONCLUSIONS 219 6.1. Managing Common Property 224 6.2. Social Capital and Relations with Other Actors 229 6.3. Outcomes of the Reform 235 REFERENCES 240 APPENDIX 1. List of Interviewed Respondents 256 APPENDIX 2. Descriptions of the Homeowners’ Associations of the Data 259 APPENDIX 3. Photos 266 KIKIMORA PUBLICATIONS 273 6 List of Tables and Figures TABLE 1. Types of goods in homeowners’ association 26 TABLE 2. Worker families’ dwelling types in Leningrad in 1935, in percentages 43 TABLE 3. Housing construction in the Soviet Union, millions of square metres 62 TABLE 4. Ownership of housing in Russia in 1990, in percentages 71 TABLE 5. Ownership of housing in Russia and St. Petersburg in 2006, in percentages 72 TABLE 6. Construction of residential buildings in Russia 82 FIGURE 1. St. Petersburg’s administration 104 FIGURE 2. Homeowners’ associations in the data, by district 126 PHOTOS 1: A typical entrance way in the centre of St. Petersburg. 266 2: Courtyard of an old house. 267 3: Electrical system in an old house. 268 4: An “elite” house. 269 5: Suburban landscape in St. Petersburg. 270 6, 7: “New” building complexes in the suburbs. 271 8, 9: “New” building complexes in the suburbs. 272 7 Rosa Vihavainen Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to all the people who have contributed to the comple- tion of this thesis in one way or another. I would like to thank all the respondents who were willing to be in- terviewed for this study and without whom this publication would not have materialised. My deepest gratitude is to my supervisor, Professor Risto Alapuro, who gave me the opportunity to participate in the research project led by him, called Self-Governmental Associations in North-West Russia. I am very much indebted to his guidance and patience in com- menting my work over the years. I am also truly grateful to other members of the research project: Professor Oleg Kharkhordin and my colleagues Olga Bychkova, Olga Kalacheva and Evgenia Popova. Thanks are owed to research assistant Dilorom Akhmedzhanova, who not only handled the practical arrangements of the interviews for me, but also shared the chal- lenges of the fieldwork with me. I must say a special word of thanks also to another research assistant, Anna Tarasenko, for making the arrangements for data collection in winter 2008. I wish to thank my colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki, in particular participants of the Spaces of Democracy seminar, for their valuable comments on the drafts of this the- sis. I attended two post-graduated schools that have been important for my work: the Graduate School for Civil Society Research of the Finnish Doctoral Program in Social Sciences and the Russia in Europe Graduate School in Border Studies. I want to thank the members and Professors of both schools for their comments. My work greatly benefited from the re- marks of fellow researchers at the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) Conferences, which I am grateful for. I am also indebted to the pre-examiners Professors Markku Kivinen and Elena Shomina for review- ing the manuscript of my thesis. I want to express my gratitude towards Martti Lujanen, Director General in the Ministry of the Environment, for his insightful comments 9 HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATIONS IN RUSSIA AFTER THE 2005 HOUSING REFORM and enthusiasm on the subject that encouraged me to pursue my work. Apart from the people mentioned, I am obliged to the following people for their advice and support on my work at its different stages: Aurore Chaigneau, Professor Natalia Lebina, Sampo Ruoppila and Anna-Maria Salmi. I must also give my thanks to fellow researchers Tuula Teräväinen and Terhi Tuominen, who shared the same office with me for many years, for making the work days a lot more enjoyable than they would have been without you. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude for my friends and family, my parents Maija and Timo Vihavainen, and my siblings Jussi Vihavainen and Marja Tingelöf, for their support. Writing this thesis has been made possible by funding from the Academy of Finland and the Finnish Doctoral Program in Social Sciences. This work was carried out at The Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki that provided me comfortable working environment. Kikimora Publications at the Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies (The Aleksanteri Institute) accepted my thesis for publication. The support of these institutions is gratefully acknowledged. 10 1. INTRODUCTION 1. Introduction Since the start of the Soviet era, everyday Russian life has been character- ised by unsatisfactory housing conditions. For decades a shortage of hous- ing forced the majority of the urban population to live in cramped condi- tions in communal apartments.1 Housing stock was owned and managed almost exclusively by the state, while new construction and maintenance was neglected, which led to deteriorating quality of housing. The common areas of a house – including staircases, lifts and courtyards – were consid- ered public property and treated as a kind of no-man’s land that everyone could use but no one cared for. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union peo- ple have gained the possibility to own their apartments. As the next step after the privatisation of housing, the management of housing is now being transferred from the public sector to the private sector. The right to own has brought with it an obligation to take care of the common areas in privatised houses. It is this fundamental change that the author examines in this book. The privatisation of state-owned housing and housing management is a process that either has been or is current- ly being implemented in all post-socialist countries. Russia is, therefore, one part of the large-scale development taking place in Eastern Europe. In 2005 a new Housing Code came into force, making homeowners fully responsible for the management and maintenance of their property. One way to do this is to establish a homeowners’ association (tovarishchestvo sobstvennikov zhil’ia, TSZh). Homeowners’ associations are a new phe- nomenon in Russia and have not been thoroughly studied to date. A study on homeowners’ associations is valuable, therefore, as it can illustrate the development of a self-governing housing management association. One of the core questions of this study is how homeowners run the associations and manage the common property. The notion that everyone needs a roof over their head makes housing an important social issue. The defects in the Russian housing situation have been politically recognised, and housing is now the subject of one of the 1 The term ‘communal apartment’ refers to an apartment shared by several families, each typically occupying one room and sharing kitchen, bathroom and other common facilities. 11 HOMEOWNERS’ ASSOCIATIONS IN RUSSIA AFTER THE 2005 HOUSING REFORM four national priority programmes in Russia (along with health, education and agriculture). The fact that homeowners’ associations are at the core of the new housing reform makes them a topical subject to study. Against this background, I use two theoretical approaches for studying homeowners’ associations. Firstly, the so-called common-pool resource regime approach is used to analyse homeowners’ associations as self-gov- erning associations, with the main question being the ways in which col- lectively taking care of common areas succeeds in practice.