VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
"The Housing Construction Fund must work more effectively. This year alone it has prepared 1,500 hectares of federal land for development on which 6 million square metres of housing will be built."
"We must fulfil our commitments to individual categories of citizens to make housing more accessible and promote buying with mortgages, the most universal instrument used throughout the world. Every effort will be made to maintain the current pace of housing construction. Modern housing standards should be introduced. The outdated prefabricated "boxes" should be replaced with comfortable, energy-efficient and environment-friendly homes, including low-rise houses. Unfortunately, we have not been paying enough attention to that topic. What we need is essentially a programme of large-scale construction of inexpensive housing. Its share in the total housing stock is now about 5%. It should be brought to 25%, let me stress, not less than 25%."
"Of course, 14.5% - an average interest rate on mortgage loans - is too high for many people. Incomes in Russia are not high enough to meet these loan requirements. For mortgage to become affordable for a broad range of people, we should lower the interest rate to 10%-11%."
"You know that pension funds are used in all countries as an instrument and a source of long-term loans, which is crucial for mortgage lending. Given the volume of saving, including the funds managed by Vnesheconombank, we could think about using these instruments in Russia, although very carefully and with maximum guarantees. VEB is currently managing 690 billion roubles ($24 billion) of pension accruals. A month ago, the Government approved a new strategy for investing pension accruals managed by VEB. Up to 20% of these funds, or some 100 billion roubles ($3.5 billion), can be invested in mortgage bonds of Russian banks."
"We must encourage the construction of affordable, comfortable, energy efficient, eco friendly housing. We could make low-rise construction one of our priorities. It is essential to develop an industry of building materials and introduce relevant technology. We must adopt standards and determine the price range of economy-class housing as soon as possible. Smart general plans for property development will help reduce the costs of housing construction."
"We must pull our people out of the slums. This is one of our major social and political tasks. This is simply our duty to our citizens who still live in such miserable conditions."
"Housing is one of the most important economic and social issues. It has remained more urgent in Russia than in any other civilized country for decades.The provision of housing for war veterans and army servicemen is a priority, and as we have promised, we will do everything in 2010 to fulfill these government commitments."
"It is particularly important that we both support the construction industry now and make substantial progress on housing problems. First of all, we need to be more proactive in allocating land for residential construction, in city-planning, and in resolving issues with utility networks. If we fail to do this, we are at risk of losing the momentum in residential construction that we have worked so hard to gain recently."
"We have arranged smooth interaction with natural monopolies, and are negotiating with banks for crediting communal infrastructural construction. As the result, the first land plots can and must be fully equipped for construction within a few months, with an emphasis on building low-rise homes."
"We need to launch new fields of the housing project this year, as we have planned, and start reclaiming vacant and misused federally owned land plots. An ad hoc fund for the promotion of housing construction has been established with this purpose. Active cooperation with the regions has helped the fund to obtain information about approximately a thousand such land plots, with the total area of a million hectares."
