Moscow boxes unquenchable light – Newspaper Kommersant No. 25 (7470) dated 02/10/2023

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation demands from the capital’s mayor’s office to declare a moratorium on the demolition of garages in Moscow. Such an initiative was put forward during the hearings in the Moscow City Duma with the participation of the owners of the liquidated buildings. The communists made similar proposals in 2017-2019, they associate new waves of demolition of boxes with the development of land under the programs of integrated development of territories (CRT). Representatives of the capital’s mayor’s office said that they still could not sell parking spaces under the program “People’s Garage” of the times of Yuri Luzhkov, adding that they did not object to the idea of ​​party members to announce a “garage renovation”.

Hearings about the problem of the owners of the capital’s garages in the Moscow City Duma were organized by deputy Leonid Zyuganov (KPRF). “Old garages are being demolished, nothing new is being offered, the number of cars is growing, the residents have a question: what to do next?” the parliamentarian described the situation. Mr. Zyuganov linked the new wave of demolitions of car pits in Moscow with the development of land under the KRT programs. It should be noted that according to the law, all non-residential buildings within the framework of such programs can be withdrawn. Since 2021, the city authorities have been using the KRT mechanism in the implementation of the renovation program in Moscow. It is noteworthy that in 2020 it was introduced into the legislation of the Russian Federation to accelerate resettlement programs not in the capital, but in the regions.

Vladislav Zaitsev, a representative of the Avtolyubitel-2 GSK in Nagatinskiy Zaton, said that the cooperative fell into the CRT coverage area in April 2022, “which they found out by accident,” after which the owners tried for several months at the mayor’s office to challenge the demolition of the GSK. “They received refusals on formal grounds,” said Mr. Zaitsev. “And in January 2023, the Moscow Committee for Architecture explained to us that it was not advisable to exclude GSK from the CRT program, because it was included in this program … Brilliant explanation.” He assured that the land was leased from the city until 2059. The representative of the parking lot in Nagatino-Sadovniki, Olga Fadeycheva (who received the demolition notice), said she did not understand “where to unload thousands of cars.” “The parking lot stood for about 40 years, and in May 2022 we were announced that we needed land,” said Lyudmila Kulchikhina, a representative of the MGSA-10 parking lot in Tsaritsyno. “The city has the political will to clean up all the garages, just like they cleaned out the stalls,” said Georgy Fedorov from the Stop Demolition public movement.

Leonid Zyuganov suggested declaring a moratorium on the demolition of the boxes for one and a half to two years, and at the same time convening an interdepartmental commission to solve the problems of their owners, similar to that in force under Yuri Luzhkov. He was supported by the coordinator of the “Left Front” Sergei Udaltsov, who recalled that such a commission was created in 2007 against the backdrop of a boom in urban planning scandals, “sometimes with shooting.” At the same time, he said that he did not understand why now, against the backdrop of a special operation, “to provoke conflicts”: “We must promote a cultural solution to the problem.”

Already in 2017, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation proposed in the Moscow City Duma to declare a similar moratorium, creating commissions in the prefectures to decide the fate of parking lots. Then the reason was the wave of dismantling that swept through the city: the authorities refused to renew the land lease agreement, after which the district commissions decided on the demolition without litigation. At the Moscow City Hall then explainedthat there is no goal to demolish all garages – only those that interfere with construction. In 2018 from City Hall documents became knownthat in place of flat garages, houses will be built under the renovation program. By order of the city department of economic policy, the owners of the boxes were promised compensation (now 175,000 rubles for a metal garage and 350,000 rubles for a reinforced concrete box). In 2019 the communists went out with the proposal of a moratorium already to the State Duma: the participants in the hearings complained that the majority of the GSK was built under the USSR, but Moscow refuses to “recognize the succession of the authorities.” Finally, in 2021, the federal law on the garage amnesty came into force, allowing you to register the rights to boxing in a simplified manner (for example, on the basis of a GSK membership book or a registration certificate for a garage). However, Ms. Fadeycheva lamented that the registration of parking spaces under this law in Moscow “remains difficult, although it was declared simple”: “The procedure is incomplete, the law is crude.” And Mr. Zaitsev expressed the new fears of the owners of the boxes: “In fact, all garage complexes in Moscow are included in the KRT programs.”

The general director of the Moscow State Unitary Enterprise “Directorate of Garage Construction”, Dmitry Khramov, who was puffed for the entire mayor’s office in the Moscow City Duma, said that 57,000 parking spaces were built under the program “People’s Garage” from the time of Yuri Luzhkov. Most of them still cannot be sold by the authorities, and the official suggested that the participants in the hearings use them. However, Mr. Zyuganov assured that there are “banally no” such parking lots at the sites of the GSK demolitions, suggesting, by analogy with the housing renovation program, that “garage renovation” be announced in Moscow. Mr. Khramov had no objections to this.

Alexander Voronov