Housing the New Russia

Description

In Housing the New Russia, Jane R. Zavisca examines Russia's attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and mortgage-dependent model of home ownership. In 1992, the post-Soviet Russian government signed an agreement with the United States to create the Russian housing market. The vision of an American-style market guided housing policy over the next two decades. Privatization gave socialist housing to existing occupants, creating a nation of homeowners overnight. New financial institutions, modeled on the American mortgage system, laid the foundation for a market. Next the state tried to stimulate mortgages-and reverse the declining birth rate, another major concern-by subsidizing loans for young families. Imported housing institutions, however, failed to resonate with local conceptions of ownership, property, and rights. Most Russians reject mortgages, which they call "debt bondage," as an unjust "overpayment" for a good they consider to be a basic right. Instead of stimulating homeownership, privatization, combined with high prices and limited credit, created a system of "property without markets." Frustrated aspirations and unjustified inequality led most Russians to call for a government-controlled housing market. Under the Soviet system, residents retained lifelong tenancy rights, perceiving the apartments they inhabited as their own. In the wake of privatization, young Russians can no longer count on the state to provide their house, nor can they afford to buy a home with wages, forcing many to live with extended family well into adulthood. Zavisca shows that the contradictions of housing policy are a significant factor in Russia's falling birth rates and the apparent failure of its pronatalist policies. These consequences further stack the deck against the likelihood that an affordable housing market will take off in the near future. Dedication Contents List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments Abbreviations Note on Translation and Russian Names Introduction: A Painful Question Part I: The Development of the Post-Soviet Housing Regime 1. The Soviet Promise: A Separate Apartment for Every Family 2. Transplant Failure: The American Housing Model in Russia 3. Maternity Capitalism: Grafting Pronatalism onto Housing Policy 4. Property without Markets: Who Got What as Markets Failed Part II: The Meaning of Housing in the New Russia 5. Disappointed Dreams: Distributive Injustice in the New Housing Order 6. Mobility Strategies: Searching for the Separate Apartment 7. Rooms of Their Own: How Housing Affects Family Size 8. Children Are Not Capital: Ambivalence about Pronatalist Housing Policies 9. To Owe Is Not to Own: Why Russians Reject Mortgages Conclusion: A Market That Could Not Emerge Appendix: Characteristics of Interviewees Cited in Text Notes Works Cited Index