http://www.ewi.info/system/files/reports/Modernizing%20Municipal%20Finance%20of%20the%20Kaliningrad%

In determining the norms, municipalities use the current level of housing availability. The working group, jointly with Moscow’s Institute of Urban Economics, which had also contributed to the development of the Russian Housing Code, suggested determining the achieved level as a ratio of the size of municipal residential premises to the number of people living on these premises under social lease agreements. This level should be higher than the norm or match it. The housing provision norm should be bigger than the norm for deeming a person to be in need of housing.

In making decisions on norms, it will be necessary to take into account municipalities’ possibilities to provide for housing and related political risks: – if the norm is set too high, the housing waiting list will be too long, and since municipalities depend heavily on subsidies and will not have financial possibilities to provide housing to those on the waiting list, this list will be mainly a declaratory document; – municipalities have differing possibilities in terms of housing provision and their decisions can be influenced by different political goals in the region, there will be no uniform method of selecting those who need to improve their living conditions. An inter-budgetary decision could be adopted to introduce average norms for calculating financial aid.

Providing housing to citizens who were put on the waiting list before the Russian Housing Code became effective is a separate issue. The categories of citizens entitled to new housing before the Russian Housing Code entered into force were determined at the federal level (for example, war veterans, Chernobyl victims, judges, prosecutors, etc.), and, in line with the redistribution of powers, a municipality should not assume financial obligations for a political decision it did not make.

The current situation in the provision of housing to lower-income citizens is that no necessary regulatory acts have been adopted at the regional level for the implementation of the Russian Housing Code.

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