Visit to Minsk Housing Construction Company MAPID

Housing construction should pick up speed in Minsk satellite towns, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko said as he visited MAPID, Minsk Housing Construction Company, on 18 September.

The head of state reaffirmed his demand to scale down housing construction in Minsk in order to avoid overpopulation. “This is not just a conversation. This matter will be closely monitored. We need to build housing in such a way that workforce will be distributed evenly across the country,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

The President was informed that about 600,000 square meters of housing is built in Minsk every year. “We plan to keep it up, but there will be redistribution in favor of satellite towns. These are great places to build new homes. We see by the example of Smolevichi that people willingly move there, thus we will keep working on it. We are building new homes in Smolevichi. Rudensk is another promising site taking into account the construction of companies there (Belarusian National Biotechnology Corporation and others), therefore we will actively develop this area and build commercial housing there, among other things,” Minsk Mayor Vladimir Kukharev said.

Aleksandr Lukashenko asked about the state of affairs with housing waiting lists in Minsk: what groups of people and how fast are provided with housing. A special attention was paid to families with many children. According to the Minsk City Executive Committee, 4,030 families with many kids will be able to start housing construction this year and 3,500 families next year.

“After that large families will be on housing waiting lists not longer than a year. According to our estimates, every year 1,600 families will be able to start housing construction in the future,” Vladimir Kukharev informed.

Top on the agenda was also construction of social housing and housing for those in need of better living conditions.

Discussing the construction of rental housing, the head of state asked who was the customer of such construction projects. The Minsk mayor informed that in order to speed up the process, a decision was made that a developer should also act as a customer and that it should also sign a loan agreement with a bank. "A draft decree is in the works to allow developers to take out loans and start construction,” he explained. According to Vladimir Kukharev, this move is expected to significantly reduce rental housing construction time.

In addition, Vladimir Kukharev spoke about plans of the Minsk City Executive Committee regarding the neighborhoods where detached houses prevail. The corresponding analysis will be done this year. “After that, we will put forward proposals to change the general plan and work out a detailed development plan for these neighborhoods,” the mayor said.