New Housing Policy Still Vulnerable to Abuse

A new government housing strategy in Kazakstan will provide twice as much housing space as the previous effort. NBCentralAsia observers say that although the new plan shows some improvement, it still does not contain enough regulations to prevent people selling state housing on at enormous profit.



On April 25, the ministry of trade and industry is to submit an improved state housing strategy for 2008-2010 for review by the government.



The new scheme is expected to provide more than 200,000 families with affordable housing. It is anticipated that 26 million square metres of housing space will be built across the country, twice the area envisaged by the previous construction plan which ends this year.



The housing will be made available according to need. Recipients will include civil servants and other public-sector employees, and young families with children on incomes of 700 to 1,800 US dollars a months. Families on incomes higher than this will be able to buy apartments with a reduced-interest mortgage, while the rest will pay rent, but will not have the option of purchasing the property outright at a later date.



NBCentralAsia observers have welcomed some of the new features in the plan, especially the intention of relocating people from homes that are in danger of collapsing, and the emphasis on taking care of public-sector workers. However, they say the scheme perpetuates the fundamental problem of the last housing plan – it contains no mechanisms to prevent a speculative market in subsidised housing.



Gennady Pushkarev, industry and construction editor at the Yuzhny Kazakstan newspaper, said, “Judging by past experience, fair distribution won’t work. The human factor always creeps in when the lists [of deserving categories] are being drawn up, there’s bribery, nepotism, forged documents and favouritism.”



Pushkarev explains that like the old scheme, this one contain loopholes for distributing housing illegally through housing priority lists.



Elubay Makhatov, deputy director of the South Kazakstan regional department of the labour and welfare ministry, says the new scheme is designed to protect several different categories, including vulnerable groups.



Makhatov noted, however, that when the housing plan was being drafted, no systematic study of the current housing market was carried out to find out what the needs of different social groups are.



“I would first have conducted a nationwide survey to establish exactly what kind of housing is needed. But there’s been no market research on housing needs and demand. You need to get accurate data from a survey and only then define the [priority] categories. At the moment it’s still unclear who this scheme is geared towards,” he said.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)