Residential Mobility in Moscow During the Transition*

The major restructuring of the housing sector in Russia can be dated from July 1991 when the definitive housing privatization law was enacted.Before this time, Russia had perhaps the most regulated housing sector in the world.'In urban areas 79% of housing units were state rentals; in the largest cities 90% were state rentals (Struyk and Kosareva, 1994: Table 1.2).Intercity mobility was restricted by the system of residence permits.Intra-city movement was severely hampered by the pervasive dominance of the waiting list procedures for allocation of municipal, departmental (mostly enterprise) and cooperative housing.*These restrictions interacted with the country's severe housing shortage, probably the equivalent to one-third of urban households (Kosareva, 1992).Those households who owned their unit had little incentive to sell because state-established appraisals set low mandatory prices and local governments usually identified the purchaser.This combination of factors would suggest very low residential mobility rates.On the other hand, Russians appear to have devised ways to mitigate the effects of their difficult environment.For example, exchanges of state apartments were officially sanctioned and may have been common.About 95,000 such swaps (equivalent to about 3% of dwellings) were recorded in 1992 in Moscow (Khadduri and Puzanov, 1993).There also appears to have been a significant (and very difficult to document3) market for the illegal sublet of state units, often by the families on the waiting list for a state unit.The effects of residency permits were offset by the issuance of 'temporary permits', which typically entitled workers (and sometimes their families) to dormitory housing.Estimates of Russian residential mobility rates during the Soviet era are limited.Long states that the 'annual rate of moving [of the population] is thought to be between 3 to 4 percent' for the Soviet Union in about 1980 (Long, 1991: 137).We have been unable to find published mobility estimates by Russian authors for this period.If the 3 4 % figure is accurate, then mobility during the Soviet era was in the lower international range,