a soviet gold mine

My sources tell me that the real money in Moscow is in real estate. To the untrained eye, the thousands of gray, crumbling Soviet era apartment buildings scattered around Moscow look like relics from a long ago civilization. The stairwells painted a uniform lime green, the interiors so cramped that two cooks in the kitchen feels overcrowded, the walls so thin that the muffled sighs of lovemaking have to be consciously ignored by the people in the bed next door. Each unit of these side by side aparment layouts uniformly designed to accomodate the unfullfilled needs of their citizen comrades.

But with property values in Moscow at some of the highest rates in the world, and developers scrambling to throw up cheaply constructed high rises that will crumble as quickly as their Soviet ancestors, the time has come to tear down all those Kruschevys. The only stumbling block for the financiers, developers, and property managers is that most of these apartments are occupied--by people. But minor nuisances have never interferred with the great pursuit of profit before so why should this time be any different. And so enter the Moscow Housing Adminstration. According to my sources, a well placed blonde bombshell with a taste for Armani and plastic surgery, all the former Soviet dwellings now fall under the domain of this particular agency. The managers of this agency have the authority to sell former state owned properties to developers. And considering that one apartment building nestled inside the Garden Ring could easily fetch several million dollars, with the developer then turning around and constructing a new office building or high rise luxury flat facility, the managers might feel a certain temptation to dip their fingers in the honey pot and take a lick. Or on the mornings they forget to eat breakfast, simply plunging their faces right into the pot and slurping like a cow at the trough. Now my sources (see above) tell me that any occupant of an apartment that is on the selling block has the right to refuse to vacate the apartment. Of course, such a decision might result in an inspector arriving to pronounce the wiring in the flat faulty and delivering an eviction notice or a mysterious fire gutting the interior. For those flat owners who see the wisdom in selling, the housing adminstration provides (free of charge) new accomodations. The fact that these new apartment buildings are almost on the border with Ukraine is also to the benefit of the occupants, as many of them are ailing babushkas who can only benefit from the fresh air and country living of being a five hour train ride from their friends and families and the only life any of them have known for the past 75 years.