A long-simmering conflict over the construction of a hotel on Kyiv’s historic Andriyivsky Uzviz street may be about to settle down.
The city council voted to take back the land from the developer on Nov. 29, halting the construction and forcing the developer to consider scaling back the project. The city said the developer had violated several regulations, the main one being that the eight-story hotel was simply too tall for the area.
The ruling was welcomed by the activists who have been campaigning for the preservation of the historic street, one of the capital’s main tourist draws, but disappointed the developer, who insists the construction was 30 percent ready and fully legal.
“What the city authorities are doing is a crime,” said Valeriy Pavlyuk, director and owner of Markon, the company developing the site. He added, however, that he was ready to seek a compromise with the city.
Markon’s subcontractor in the hotel project used to be KADORR Group, owned by Odesa-based developer and Kyiv Post publisher Adnan Kivan. However, KADORR left the project in June, according to the company’s representative.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko was one of those who demanded that construction be stopped.
“On a landmark street like Andriyivsky Uzviz, a developer can’t just build whatever they want,” he said at a meeting with the activists in November.
Markon’s Pavlyuk said he would consider slightly altering the project to meet the activists halfway, even if it meant he had to make the hotel smaller and therefore less profitable.
The dispute over the hotel’s construction highlighted the problematic way Kyiv approaches its development.
Thanks to a mix of intricate bureaucracy and corruption, and to a blurry vision of how the old city should evolve, hardly any construction in the central Kyiv goes on without scandal. City authorities, changing every five years, would allocate land in violation of their own rules. Developers would violate the rules of construction for designated plots and then seek a compromise with the authorities. Citizens would protest, wanting their city preserved.
The losing party is always Kyiv, however.
The city’s 19th-century central blocks are dotted with empty houses. Their owners are forbidden to demolish them and instead wait for the buildings to fall down and free up space for new office centers and apartment blocks. Next to the unwanted ghost houses, incongruous new buildings rise up as a testimony of absence of proper planning and the selectiveness of the authorities’ controls.
Hotel controversy
The hotel in question has been under construction on an empty lot at 14-16 Andriyivsky Uzviz, in the middle of the winding, hilly street.
The 182-suite hotel would stand between Andriyivsky Uzviz and Frolivska Street. The hotel is planned as a cascade: the side facing Frolivska Street will be eight stories high, while the side facing the historic Andriyivsky Uzviz is to have only four stories and a mansard roof.
Markon leased the land from the city in 2006, under then-Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko. The land was leased for 15 years with the purpose of building a hotel.
When the construction finally started in late 2016, it quickly grabbed the public’s attention.
Read more: Neglect, new hotel construction threaten Kyiv’s famous historic street
Local citizens and city preservation activists sounded the alarm, saying the construction was too high for the area and would distort the look of the street. They argued that the planned hotel would be way too high: the surrounding buildings on Andriyivskiy Uzviz are two- or three-stories high, with only a couple of five-story “high-risers” at the end and beginning of the street.
Locals also complained the construction was damaging the foundations of nearby buildings because of its size.
Pavlyuk says changing rules are the problem. He claims that when Markon got the land, the planned size of the hotel fit in with the existing regulations. But in March 2017, the ministry of culture expanded the protected historic area on Andriyivsky Uzviz, including the site of the future hotel.
Because of it, the height limit for the street is now 12 meters. The developer’s current plan would have the hotel’s front side rise 16 meters over Andiyivsky Uzviz.
“It doesn’t work when one relies on 10-year-old documents,” says Oleksandr Mishchenko, a member of the city council who initiated the termination of Markon’s lease. “Yes, those were in effect once, but not today.”
Markon’s Pavlyuk, however, argues that his old permits should still be valid and unaffected by the new rules.
Responding to the public’s protests, the City Development Department of the Kyiv Administration ordered a halt to the construction in April, but the developer sued and got the ban lifted in October.
Construction work restarted – but not for long.
Klitschko intervened on Nov. 16, calling a meeting between the activists and authorities. He said he wanted a special committee to review the project and see if it fits the style of Andriyvsky Uzviz and the surrounding historic neighborhood of Podil. Then, he added, the developer could alter the hotel project. Until then, the construction must be stopped, Klitschko said.
But Markon went on building the hotel, so a week after the meeting with the mayor, the city authorities came in and removed the construction crane from the site.
Then on Nov. 29, the city council voted to terminate the land lease agreement with Markon due to several violations. One of them was the building’s height: the hotel exceeded the 12-meter limitation that exists for this area.
Another violation considered the time of construction. According to the city, the developer had promised to build the hotel in three years, but the construction it fact started in 2016, 10 years after the land was leased, and six years after the city issued construction permits.
What happens now?
This doesn’t mean the hotel project is over. Now, the city and the developer will negotiate how the project can be changed to satisfy the city’s demands.
A likely option, according to Pavlyuk, is reducing the building by one floor – then, the part facing Andriyivsky Uzviz will have three floors and a mansard roof.
The compromise appears to lie in this direction. The city council’s Mishchenko told the Kyiv Post that the council was open to reaching an agreement with Markon if the company reduced the height of the hotel.
The problem is, losing just one floor isn’t enough for the local activists.
Olha Rutkovska, an activist representing the Community of Andriyivsky Uzviz Street, said she would end their opposition to the project if its façade didn’t exceed nine meters – which is no more than three floors. Only this way, she said, would the hotel not block the view of St. Andrew’s Church from Podil.
Markon’s director Pavlyuk says he is ready to sign a memorandum of understanding and cooperation between his construction company, the local community activists, and the Kyiv City Administration.
However, he says he wouldn’t undergo the complete coordination procedure from scratch, starting with the submission of the construction project, as he says was suggested by the city council. Pavlyuk says his company has done this already and nobody has any legal grounds to request that his company repeat the process.
“This will be in direct contradiction with the law, and we have achieved 30 percent readiness of the project,” he says.
Meanwhile, Pavlyuk says if the city stops the project, his company will demand monetary compensation of up to Hr 1.5 billion (or $53.5 million) based on the market price of $5,000 per square meter.
Construction clashes
The case of the stalled hotel construction on Andriyivsky Uzviz is far from unique.
The land plot next to the hotel belongs to Esta Holding, the development wing of Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov’s System Capital Management holding company. In 2012, the company planned to build an office center at the spot – it would have eight stories, just like Markon’s planned hotel.
But after the company demolished two old buildings on the site, the public protested strongly. The company called it a mistake, and said it decided to not build an office center and instead would give the space to artists. That never was done, and the site stands vacant.
Elsewhere in Podil, there have been other controversial construction projects.
The most famous one was the Podil Prestige apartment block on Nyzhniy Val Street. The media nicknamed it the “monster house” because of its huge size and incongruous design compared to the smaller and older buildings of Podil. The city authorities, backed by the public, froze the use of the nearly completed building in 2015 because the developer had allegedly added five stories to the original design.
Another ongoing dispute involves the construction of a mall at an archeological site on Poshtova Square in Podil. The city council voted on June 21 to carry out excavations at the site, where a medieval Kyiv street was found, but didn’t order a halt to the construction of a shopping mall at the same place. Citizens and preservation activists have rallied to have a museum built on the site.
Another high-profile clash between the public and a developer took place at another historic area near Lvivska Square, where a developer, Emporium Properties, is constructing several high-rising apartment buildings. The locals fear the local infrastructure, including roads, is too weak to support the addition of several thousand apartments.
They also pointed out that the General Plan, a document containing guidelines for the capital’s development, recommends a 27-meter height limit for this area. The highest of the planned buildings were to reach 22 stories, exceeding that recommendation more than two times. At one point, nationalist activists broke the site’s fence to stop the construction.
The conflict ended unexpectedly, with Mayor Klitschko announcing he had reached a compromise with the developer. The compromise, however, meant only that the highest of the buildings would drop from 22 down to 19 stories – still way too high, activists argue.
