Crumbling Homes Add to Georgia's Woes

Tsitsino Mugriauli lives on Stalin street in the Georgian town of Vale, and she is convinced no one has bothered repairing her home since the time of the Soviet dictator.



She has two twins, and her problems are typical for thousands of Georgians: their homes were built by a superpower, but the new independent state cannot afford to repair them.



In good weather, the sun shines through the holes in the walls. In bad weather, raindrops splash onto the floor and residents stay up all night to empty the buckets that catch them.



“I have three-month-old twins. As soon as the wind gets up, our building starts to howl. When this sound gets loud, I take the children onto the street. The building could fall over at any moment,” Mugriauli said.



Around a third of the 3,000 residents of Vale, which is near the Turkish border in southern Georgia, live in apartment blocks built in the 1940s for workers coming to the region’s coal mines. The buildings have never been restored.



“Stones and cement are always falling from the building. I just pray that it falls down when there are no children at home,” Mugriauli’s neighbour Marina Shubitidze said.



A two-storey building on this street collapsed just four years ago, with no one being killed through pure luck.



“The residents heard a strange sound, realised what was happened and ran outside. Luckily, there was no one hurt. But this could happen again with any block and we might not be so lucky next time,” Varlam Baghdoshvili, another resident, said.



The problems got significantly worse after 1995, when a border crossing was opened here to allow trade with Turkey. Heavy trucks began to regularly rumble through the town, and the vibrations damaged the local houses.



“This road was intended for trucks weighing 12 or 15 tonnes, and now they come through towing trailers of 60 or 70 tonnes. Whenever a truck goes by, the houses shake as if the truck was driving right through our flat,” Karapet Sarkisyan, another neighbour, said.



The residents blame the government for its failure to repair their homes. They say they have asked for help since 1995, but nothing had been done apart from a few cosmetic improvements.



The government, however, says it is swamped by the scale of the problem, and simply does not have the resources to repair all the houses in Georgia that need attention.



“There are equivalent problems in other regions of Georgia. Most apartment blocks were built in Soviet times and many have never been restored. Many buildings have passed their life spans,” said Lasha Chkadua, the president’s representative in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region that contains Vale.



“The situation in Vale is just one of the most difficult. Repair work involves so much expense that solving this problem in a short time span just cannot happen.



“I am not very well acquainted with the problems of these blocks, but in the state budget are funds assigned for regional development, with the help of which problems are solved that local budgets cannot deal with.”



Local residents are required to register an association with the local government, after which money can arrive from the administration for repair work. The residents’ association is required to cover 20 per cent of costs, with the state paying for the remainder.



However, according to Gela Gozalishvili, a representative of the local administration, there is only enough state money available to repair the roofs of three or four buildings in Vale, and there is no money for rebuilding the walls, which are the responsibilities of the residents who own the flats.



“For residents’ associations, there are 46,000 laris (about 28,000 US dollars) in the budget. This money will be received by the most active associations,” David Atunashvili, head of the administration in the Akhaltsikhe region, said.



The region’s whole budget comes to just three million lari. “Three year’s worth of the budget would not be enough to repair all the buildings,” he said.



But even the minimal help supposedly being offered has not been seen by the residents.



Marina Abuladze, a 23-year-old, moved into a five-storey block a year ago with her husband and two children. Two of the staircases in the block are completely derelict, while the third has just two families living on it. She had never heard of government assistance before IWPR informed her of it.



“We receive no help at all. My children are starving, where will I find money for the roof,” she asked, in words echoed by others living in the blocks.



“I do not think this programme will be fulfilled. Who can pay the 20 per cent they are demanding from the population? I have not worked for 16 years, and I’m not receiving a pension. I cannot contribute 100 laris, not even 10,” said Sarkisyan.



Tamar Uchidze is a correspondent from the Southern Gates newspaper in Akhaltsikhe.