‘The two years Affordable Housing program has been running for have resulted in a range of problems that Sverdlovsk Region’s entire building community has to deal with somehow,’ the Union of Sverdlovsk Region Building Industry Enterprises’ CEO Yuri Chumerin said in the course of a round table discussion on Affordable Housing in Yekaterinburg.

‘First of all, the need for the prime cost of housing to go down is obvious. Secondly, we have to deal with the drawing up of new normative documents, since these haven’t been updated for a long time. Thirdly, they say the cost of housing increases due to building materials growing more expensive. I don’t think this is the case. The building materials prices normally remain more or less the same for long enough, so they don’t affect the end price of housing that much. The thing is, the cost of getting connected to engineering infrastructure does go up. This is a problem we all see clearly and are trying to find a solution to. It’s good to know that some companies understand this and are trying to help us. For one, Renova-StroyGroup-Akademicheskoye is working on a huge Academic project. As this builder is not trying to back out of these difficulties, I’m positive they will be able to fully develop the territory they are working on,’ Chumerin noted.