Middle-class Moscow dwellers flee to the countryside
AFP
By Eleonore Dermy
MOSCOW, Jan 28 2007-Cottages, villas, even
chalets are sprouting around Moscow as a growing
middle class takes to the countryside in a bid to
escape congestion, high prices and shabby Soviet housing in the city.
The region around the Russian capital was once
dotted with dachas, modest wooden houses built on
state land, where urban dwellers would spend
weekends and summers tending vegetable plots and gardens.
Even in post-Soviet times, building anything
other than a wooden dacha was considered a
privilege for the super-rich. But that is no
longer the case as the middle class enters the property market.
Six years ago, when 34-year-old Konstantin and
his wife decided to build a new house in
Fedyukovo, a small village eight kilometres (five
miles) south of Moscow, the beautiful wooded area was fairly empty.
Now, dozens of houses surround his village, the
roads in the village are well-kept and there is
even a new church, inaugurated in December and
built with funds from one particularly wealthy neighbour.
“The four of us used lived in a 70-square-meter
flat in a suburb,” said Konstantin, sales
director at a Russian publishing house.
But then “we had enough of living in Moscow, a
dirty and polluted city, and wanted to live out in the country.”
The couple built a 500-square-metre house “in the
Alsatian style,” with frame walls and a sloped
roof topped by a weathercock. Now they are
planning a Russian bathhouse in the garden.
“Since 2000, we have been seeing a wave of
migration from Moscow into the countryside …
People are looking for a more ecological way of
life,” said Vladimir Yakhontov, at the Miel real estate agency.
Soaring real estate prices in Moscow are another
reason many property owners are moving to the
suburbs. Analysts estimate property prices have
risen by a factor of as much as 10 in just six years.
“For the same price I can have either a
three-room apartment in Moscow or a
250-square-meter house outside,” said Anton, a
41-year-old interpreter who said he was fine with
living 10 kilometers from the city and commuting.
The trend has prompted property developers to
push further and further out from Moscow,
building whole clusters of sometimes luxurious
“cottages,” as well as more modest dwellings with
a small garden and named “town houses.”
But analysts said that a true exodus is being
held back by several obstacles. “The country
suffers a lot from a lack of social
infrastructure, like schools, hospitals and stores,” Yakhontov said.
“Also, big companies are still reluctant to move
their offices to the outskirts, like they do in
large European cities. Traffic jams entering
Moscow are also putting people off from moving,” he added.
“These issues should be resolved over the next decade.”
