Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 25 – One in every 15 buildings where Russians live is now so old that under Russian law, any repairs are considered “economically unfeasible,” thus leaving millions of Russians in a gray area where their residences have not yet been declared unsafe but that they need repairs that the authorities are not willing to authorize because of the buildings’ ages.
Such housing stock is set to grow to 54 million square meters by 2030 and 216 million square meters by 2040, according to a study by the Moscow Institute of Economic Forecasting (forecast.ru/_ARCHIVE/Analitics/OM/REK_12_09_23.pdf and newizv.ru/news/2026-02-25/sovetskie-doma-ruhnut-cherez-10-let-kuda-uhodyat-dengi-na-kapremont-438832).
Most of these aging buildings were erected in Soviet times with a projected lifespan of 25 to 30 years. But many have remained occupied for as much as 60 years and haven’t seen any major renovations for more than half a century. There simply isn’t enough money budgeted or being collected from residents to change that.
And officials are hiding behind the law that they say prevents them from throwing good money after bad and requires that these aging housing blocks be torn down and replaced with new housing, something that isn’t happening rapidly enough to keep people from remaining in housing that is on the verge of collapse.
One especially worrisome aspects of this problem is that elevators in multi-story housing in major cities are rapidly reaching the end of their lifetimes and aren’t replaced. In 2025, for example, 70,000 elevators in Russia reached the end of their working life, but the 2026 government plan calls for replacing only 19,000 to 21,000 of them.
That means that the number of elevators likely to fail will continue to increase, making access to housing in the upper stories even more difficult than it is now for many Russians.
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