A lot of rot is under way in Kyiv’s historical center.
Buildings that date back to the 1700s are often abandoned, owned through layers of shell companies that conceal the true owners, who have no intention of restoring the structures.
Why? Land prices in Kyiv’s center remain extremely high, owners pay little or no property tax and developers want to maximize the amount of space available in a given building. It’s cheaper for developers to allow a building to collapse and then build a new structure than to restore a historically valuable home in accordance with legal requirements.
The situation — while dire — has led to spots of activism and creative projects to revitalize damaged portions of the city center.
One interactive map, created by Texty.org.ua and called “Kyiv’s remains,” visualizes all of the abandoned, historic buildings across Kyiv.
“At the current moment, without working mechanisms to return these buildings to the housing fund and determining their legal status, little can be done,” said Stanislav Dyomin, a Kyiv architect.
See for yourself
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, after elected in 2014, promised to tackle the problem of abandoned buildings.
Klitschko commissioned a study of historical buildings, resulting in the following findings: Out of the city’s old residential buildings, 101 are not safe for residency, while 150 are in an unsatisfactory condition.
And 40 percent of these buildings are in private ownership.
But many activists think that these findings lowball the amount of buildings in danger. An investigation by watchdog “Dostup do pravdy” identified dozens of decaying buildings by addressing neighborhood councils.
As Dyomin, the Kyiv architect who has worked on restoring damaged historical buildings said, “you can see for yourself.”
Mikhelson
One shining example is the so-called “Mikhelson House” on Pushkinska Street in the city center.
Stretching from 33 to 37 of the street’s house numbers, the ornate mansion dates to 1884. It was then that the wealthy Kyiv merchant Friedrich Mikhelson decided to build the complex for his two daughters.
The buildings have an ornate exterior, with detailed frescoes that are now decaying from lack of maintenance. Some historical records compare the interiors to that of the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. One of the buildings was used to film Soviet dramas set in the Tsarist period.
“The most beautiful buildings in the city are being destroyed by developers and the city government,” said Mykola Zhukov, a pensioner-activist who leads the Pushkinska-Chervonoarmiyska Street Residents Defense Committee.
The building has been abandoned since the late 1990s, and is located next to a kindergarten that was also abandoned after a 2007 raider attack.
“At eight in the morning a bulldozer came and started to tear the building down,” Zhukov recalled, saying that the destruction only stopped when a local resident decided to stand under the vehicle’s blade.
“Then a local ‘maidan’ started, and our volunteers started to defend the kindergarten,” he added.
Mikhelson House was sold to a group called “D.I.B.” by the Kyiv city government, which didn’t have the money to conduct repairs on the building. From there, it was resold twice and ended up in the hands of an anonymous company called “House on Pushkinska,” which entered into a joint-venture with Kyiv Developer NEST for the project.
NEST denies any link with “House on Pushkinska” beyond the joint venture, and maintains that court challenges from Zhukov’s group are keeping it from restoring the buildings and eventually putting them back into use.
Zhukov, along with other neighbors, say that NEST intends to let the buildings collapse before building a residential highrise on the site.
Baron, Guest house
Mikhelson House, like other old Kyiv buildings, have the legal status of historical monuments.
And while that has succeeded in warding off their destruction in the past, Dyomin said that a well-intentioned new law which established an electronic registry for historical buildings may have changed the situation.
“There is a very bizarre formulation in the law,” said Dyomin, saying that the registry does not include all of the abandoned buildings in the city center.
“Many buildings that appear to be historical monuments have not been placed into the register,” Dyomin said.
That issue could threaten such architectural achievements as the Baron’s House on 1 Yaroslaviv Val.
That dark red building, which features a spire rising out of its ornate facade, was built over a period from 1850 to 1898, going from being an unremarkable two-story house to its final, towered firm after Polish nobleman Mikhail Podgorsky bought it in 1892.
But since the building’s communal apartments were ended and the building was privatized in the early 2000s, neither nobleman nor commoner have been able to inhabit the building.
Kyiv media reports have linked the building to former city council deputy Oleksandr Loyfenfeld.
Ongoing litigation over the object’s future has gone nowhere.
“Restoring that building would be long and complicated, with a heavy financial burden,” Dyomin said.
Gostiny Dvor, a pre-revolutionary building takes up a huge area in central Podil, operated as a shopping mall until 2011, when Party of Regions Prime Minister Mykola Azarov’s Cabinet of Ministers removed the building from the list of historical monuments, allowing a private company to undertake extensive renovations.
In February 2013, a fire destroyed the building’s roof, leaving it as a gaping ruin in the historical district’s center.
Since the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, the government has restored the building’s historically protected status, but decisions over what to do with it have been caught up in more litigation.
Limited options
Part of the issue of litigation surrounding the decaying building is that lengthy court proceedings play to the interests of those who would want to see the buildings collapse.
The longer the cases take, the more likely it is that a 19th century building will disintegrate, destroying the historical monument and allowing the owner to build a glass-covered high-rise in its place.
“The market is very inflated,” said Viktor Hleba, an architect and activist on real estate issues. “But some companies will make money off of selling the bricks and parts in a ruined old building.”
Zhukov, the Pushkinska Street activist, remains hopeful.
“We’ve won many court decisions,” he said. “We’ll keep trying.”
The Kyiv Post has since 2010 published a periodic series of stories headlined “Ghost Town,” about the failure of Kyiv’s municipal authorities to force building owners to either renovate or rebuild rotting and vacant properties in the capital. Many property owners have no interest in developing the buildings. They are “sitting” on them, anticipating the price of land in the city center will rise or the buildings will crumble so they don’t have to meet rebuilding regulations. Kyiv’s government encourages such urban blight through low property taxes and weak action against vacant properties.
Ghost Town – July 9, 2010
Greedy owners and lack of property taxes have left parts of Kyiv resembling a ghost town. Rather than finding investors who could fix them up, many of the city’s most beautiful and historic buildings are falling apart.
Ghost Town Revisited – Aug. 3, 2012
Ghosts are the only things living in some of Kyiv’s wonderful, ancient mansions. Dozens of such buildings stand abandoned along the central streets.
