Housing Differentiation in Post-Soviet Russia: The Institutional and Economic Context of Housing Tenure Group Dynamics

Abstract

This article presents the population dynamics of housing tenure groups in the changing institutional and economic conditions of post-Soviet Russia. We show that during the first stages of privatization, different income groups did not differ in the share of households whose members obtained the status of property owners, but that the share of those who owned the housing they occupied in the low-income group became lower than in other groups beginning in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the differentiation of income groups by ownership of other housing assets remains: There are twice as many who own second housing properties among high-income households than among the poor. The modern housing stratum of Russian households represents a combination of the two large middle groups, those who own only apartments or houses (70 percent), and a multitude of small, low-populated groups: “housing minorities” of apartment tenants below that stratification (10 percent) and owners of several housing assets above it (16–17 percent). We might attribute the middle stratum to the 1.5 percent of households living in homes they themselves do not own but who own other housing assets.

Keywords:

• nonfinancial assets
• housing tenure groups
• home ownership
• housing privatization
• housing stratification

Notes

1. OECD Framework for Statistics on the Distribution of Household Income, Consumption and Wealth (OECD Publishing, 2013) (available at www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/framework-fo-statistics-on-the-distribution-of-household-income-consumption-and-wealth_9789264194830-en).

2. OECD Guidelines for Micro Statistics on Household Wealth (OECD Publishing, 2013) (available at www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/guidelines-for-micro-statistics-on-household-wealth_9789264194878-en).

3. Wealth in Great Britain. Wave 4, 2012 to 2014 (Office for National Statistics, 2015) (available at https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/was/wealth-in-great-britain-wave-4/2012-2014/index.html).

4. OECD. In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2015) (available at http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2084674/in-it-together.pdf).

5. New OECD Affordable Housing Database (2015) (available at http://www.oecd.org/social/affordable-housing-database.htm).

6. New OECD Affordable Housing Database.

7. Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik. 2016: Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: Rosstat, 2015) (available at www.gks.ru/free_doc/doc_2016/year/year16.pdf).

8. Bank of Russia provides statistics up to 2008 only on the volume of mortgages issued, not the number of mortgages.

9. “Svedeniia o rynke zhilishchnogo (ipotechnogo zhilishchnogo) kreditovaniia v Rossii,” Statisticheskii sbornik, no. 1 (2005–2013 gg.) (TsB RF Departament statistiki, 2014) (available at www.cbr.ru/statistics/?PrtId=ipoteka); “Svedeniia o rynke zhilishchnogo (ipotechnogo zhilishchnogo) kreditovaniia v Rossii,” Statisticheskii sbornik no. 3 (2011–2015 gg.) (TsB RF, 2016) (available at www.cbr.statistics/?PrtId=ipoteka).

10. Programma “Zhil’e dlia rossiiskoi sem’i” (available at http://xn——7sbaks7aamikcgn.xn–p1ai/about/general_condition).

11. Stroitel’stvo v Rossii—2016 (Federal’naia sluzhba gosudarstvennoi statistiki) (available at www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/ru/statistics/publications/catalog/doc_1138716432453).

12. Publichnyi godovoi otchet Pensionnogo fonda Rossii za 2016 god (Pensionnyi fond RF) (available at http://www.pfrf.ru/files/id/press_center/godovoi_otchet/Annual_report_2016_3.pdf).

13. Godovoi otchet. 2015 (Pensionnyi fond RF, 2015) (available at www.pfrf.ru/files/id/press_center/godovoi_otchet/Pension_fund_Annual_report_2015_1.pdf).

14. Rossiiskii monitoring ekonomicheskogo polozheniia i zdorov’ia naseleniia (NIU VShE) (available at www.hse.ru/rlms).

15. Itogi kompleksnogo nabliudeniia uslovii zhizni naseleniia (available at www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/inspection/itog_inspect1.htm).

16. “Garden house” refers to a nonresidential building limited to seasonal and temporary use, unlike a dacha, which is classified as a residential building.—Trans.

17. Due to differences in how they assess the populations of this housing tenure group, there is a difference in the numbers estimated for owner-occupied housing overall. The CSLC records numbers about five percentage points higher than the RLMS.

18. The total population of these household groups represents 98.4 percent. The remaining 1.6 percent of households are dispersed among other housing tenure groups (less than 0.2 percent each) who live in housing they do not own and who indicated their ownership of various other housing assets.

19. Households are divided into income groups based on the ratio of per-capita income to per-capita subsistence minimum, calculated while accounting for the household’s demographic composition and the subsistence minimum for different categories of the population in regions where the RLMS sampling was conducted. See “Velichina prozhitochnogo minimuma” (Edinaia mezhvedomstvennaia informatsionno-statisticheskaia sistema) (available at www.fedstat.ru/indicator/30957).

20. This classification uses the age of the senior-most household members, the presence of married couples or other adults, and the presence or absence of children under the age of eighteen.