Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev arrived in Kaliningrad to chair a meeting on the implementation of national projects in Russia on July 16, 2007. Prior to this meeting, he attended a press briefing and answered the reporters’ questions, most of which had to do with the National Affordable Housing Project. Some of his answers could be characterized as rather unexpected. Mr. Medvedev said, for instance, that housing certainly had to be made affordable in terms of the incomes Russian citizens actually have, but there could be different affordability criteria. ‘Housing simply can’t grow affordable for virtually all Russians; it took most developed countries ten to fifteen years to reach this goal,’ he observed.

Ironically, it has been claimed before that the housing project must be implemented as quickly as possible. Given the ever-growing housing prices, though, the government had to admit that these plans failed to work.