Kyiv's City Administration thinks it might not even be worth repairing the city's notorious khrushchyovkas
Khrushchyovkas, the five-story mass-produced housing blocks built under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushche may vanish forever if the government follows through with plans to reform the country’s problematic housing sector.
Oleksiy Kucherenko, the newly appointed head of the State Committee of Housing and Municipal Economy, presented a novel solution to Ukraine’s housing problems during an April 29 press conference: wreck the old khrushchyovkas and erect new housing in their place.
The idea isn’t completely new. Over the last five years, various Kyiv city officials have suggested demolishing the Khrushchev-era apartments in order to meet the demand for better, modern housing.
According to the City Administration’s construction committee, Kyiv’s krushchyovkas, built in the 1950s and 1960s, were intended to have service lives of only 20 years. Today there are approximately 2,000 khrushchyovkas in Kyiv – about 8 million square meters’ worth of residential space.
Birth of a plan
Initially, the city planned only to refurbish the Soviet-era buildings.
But revamping a 60-flat khrushchyovka apartment block costs between $500 and $1,000 per apartment, making it economically unprofitable.
“After we studied the situation thoroughly, we came to the conclusion that reconstructing the dilapidated five-story apartment buildings would not be economically feasible or cost-effective. Instead of reconstructing such buildings, we decided to launch a program of demolishing the [city’s] khrushchyovkas,” Kucherenko said.
Under the new program, the City Administration has issued a resolution giving development companies whole blocks for reconstruction.
The proposed system is cyclical. Developers are given a piece of land near existing khrushchyovkas. Once developers build new apartment buildings on that land, they moved the residents of the khrushchyovkas into these new buildings. Once the moving process is complete, the old krushchyovkas are destroyed, a new high-rise built and the process begins anew.
In exchange for relocating the residents, the developers are given the land on which the new apartments are built.
According to the plan, the prime candidates for relocation are the khrushchyovky blocks occupying 458 hectares in the district of Syrets. Other targeted blocks are located between the streets Frunze, Teryokhina and Novokonstyantynivska, as well as in the Vitryani Hory and Hrechka districts.
Konti Ukraina, an affiliate of Russia’s Konti Group developers, received from the city four experimental land plots bearing old khrushchyovka blocks in February. Nikolay Dymura, head of Konti, says planning alone could take as much as one or two years, and the entire project may be completed in about five years.
Built-in benefits
The new legislation governing the reconstruction project says that authorities can relocate even people who are unwilling to move.
“There’s always one family unwilling to move in each building. In such a case, the fate of 95 percent of the building’s residents will depend on one family,” Kucherenko said.
He said that low-income khrushchyovka residents could benefit from moving into new housing apartments.
According to city statistics, the average occupant of a five-story building has just 16 square meters of living space. After they move, they would have 50 percent more, Kucherenko said.
