Zavisca Jane R. Housing the New Russia

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. — 264 p. — ISBN10: 0801477379; ISBN13: 978-0801477379In Housing the New Russia, Jane R. Zavisca examines Russia’s attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and mortgage-dependent model of homeownership. In 1992, the post-Soviet Russian government signed an agreement with the United States to create the Russian housing market. The vision of an American-style market guided housing policy over the next two decades. Privatization gave socialist housing to existing occupants, creating a nation of homeowners overnight. New financial institutions, modeled on the American mortgage system, laid the foundation for a market. Next the state tried to stimulate mortgages―and reverse the declining birth rate, another major concern―by subsidizing loans for young families.Introduction: A Painful QuestionThe Development of the Post-Soviet Housing RegimeThe Soviet Promise: A Separate Apartment for Every Family
Transplant Failure: The American Housing Model in Russia
Maternity Capitalism: Grafting Pronatalism onto Housing Policy
Property without Markets: Who Got What as Markets FailedThe Meaning of Housing in the New RussiaDisappointed Dreams: Distributive Injustice in the New Housing Order
Mobility Strategies: Searching for the Separate Apartment
Rooms of Their Own: How Housing Affects Family Size
Children Are Not Capital: Ambivalence about Pronatalist Housing Policies
To Owe Is Not to Own: Why Russians Reject MortgagesConclusion: A Market That Could Not EmergeAppendix: Characteristics of Interviewees Cited in Text