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- A piece of hiring: the birth rate will be increased with the help of preferential rental housing

A piece of hiring: the birth rate will be increased with the help of preferential rental housing

It is necessary to work out a model of preferential rental housing for families with children, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matvienko said at a meeting between Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and senators. Experts see subsidizing housing rentals as an effective solution to the housing problem for young families: this will allow you to increase the living space when new children appear. A mortgage, as a recent study by the National Research University of Higher School of Economics has shown, often has a positive effect on the desire to have a first child, but it can also be a deterrent to the birth of a second and subsequent children. Izvestia investigated why preferential rental housing can have a more positive impact on demographics than a family mortgage.
How does preferential housing rental work?
Valentina Matvienko noted that the topic of preferential rental housing for families with children has been discussed many times and some material has been developed. Now this model needs to be worked out. She asked Mikhail Mishustin to give an appropriate instruction.
Last week, Alexander Vaino, director of the Young Professionals department at the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), also told the Dvizhenie real estate forum that a program for preferential rental for young people is currently being developed in Russia. Speaking about this, he mentioned an ASI survey conducted among young people aged 16 to 28, according to which only 35% of respondents are currently considering renting a home.
Vaino pointed out that a preferential rental program for young people is being developed jointly with Dom.Russian Federation", "Rostec" and "colleagues from Tatarstan". At first, the program will be available to young workers in key industries: industry, construction, energy, agriculture. The mechanism is still being developed and should appear by the end of the year.
In the "House.The Russian Federation also explained that there is already a program "Affordable rental housing in the Far Eastern Federal District", which is being implemented with the support of the government. It was created not for young families with children, but for young professionals, regardless of whether they have families or not. The categories of tenants are determined by the authorities of the Far Eastern Federal District regions.
Under this program, 10,000 rental apartments will be built for those who are employed by enterprises in the Far East. The rental rate is reduced due to subsidies from the regional and federal budgets. The residential premises are acquired by the Residential Development Institute at the construction stage, the apartments are already rented with decoration and furniture. After the purchase and commissioning of the house, they are leased to regional operators. According to Dom.Russia", the program is being implemented until 2043, and 640 apartments are currently occupied.
Izvestia also sent inquiries to the Ministry of Labor of the Russian Federation and the Agency for Strategic Initiatives.
How does a mortgage affect the birth of children
Sergey Rybalchenko, Chairman of the Commission on Demography of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, notes that now preferential mortgages have become the main way to solve the housing problem of young families in Russia. However, a mortgage loan is often a deterrent to the appearance of the next child in the family, the expert believes.
— In recent years, we have seen a decrease in the average size of housing purchased with a mortgage. Housing is becoming more expensive, its availability is falling, and in this regard, a family that took out a mortgage at the birth of its first child often no longer actually thinks about the birth of a second, much less a third," he told Izvestia.
A recent study by Professor Elena Vakulenko and Rufina Yevgrafova, a graduate student at the HSE Faculty of Economics (available from Izvestia) Rather, it indicates the positive impact of a mortgage loan on the desire of families to have a child.
The study, however, was based on data from the telephone survey "Man, family, Society 2020", which involved more than 9 thousand citizens aged 18 to 49 years. They were asked if they planned to have a baby in the next three years. It also clarified a person's attitude to the very idea of taking out an interest—free mortgage in order to separate those cases when he takes out a housing loan precisely because he already wants to have a child from those when the birth of children follows the resolution of the housing issue.
It turned out that having a mortgage increases the probability of intending to have a child in the next three years by 39%. For childless people, the effect persists, while for those who already have children, mortgages do not affect future plans, the researchers say.
"Based on the current survey data, it was not possible to study the regional aspect, but in our other study based on macrodata from regions, we also observe a positive relationship between the total fertility rate and the volume of mortgage loans issued," emphasizes Elena Vakulenko.
The researchers conclude that mortgage loans are not so much a burden on the family budget as a tool for stability and improvement of housing conditions. In this regard, the authors recommended deepening the mechanisms of preferential lending: to focus rates on young families without children and to introduce dynamic subsidy mechanisms, reducing rates at the birth of each subsequent child.
At the same time, the HSE scientists emphasize, "intuitively, it seems that the mortgage burden can be a deterrent if monthly payments affect the family budget too much."
"The positive relationship between reproductive intentions and mortgages may signal the dominance of the housing effect over the income effect," Rufina Yevgrafova, a graduate student at the HSE Faculty of Economics, told Izvestia. — In this sense, the provision of preferential rental housing may have a stronger positive impact on fertility, because the negative effect of reduced disposable income due to monthly mortgage payments will be weakened.
What are the alternatives to mortgages?
Sergey Rybalchenko emphasizes that a family should have many tools to choose from for solving housing problems, and a mortgage is just one of them.
— There are, for example, construction storage facilities that operate in other countries. In Germany, they are most widespread when a family initially accumulates a contribution and only then decides to purchase their own home," said Sergey Rybalchenko. — This mechanism makes the purchase system more reliable. A person does not get on the so-called credit needle when a significant part of the budget is allocated to repay the loan.
Another mechanism is housing and savings cooperatives, which also operate in Russia. In this system, housing is purchased for 1 square meter, that is, the family "accumulates housing." One of the most interesting ZHNK projects was implemented in the Belgorod region. Another similar form is housing construction cooperatives, which existed in Moscow in the 80s and 90s of the last century, when many young families were able to solve their housing problems in this way.
— But large—scale government support for mortgage lending, in fact, has prevented the development of other forms of home ownership, - said Sergey Rybalchenko. — Owning a home is one of the most desirable forms of solving the housing problem for a family, but, as various studies show, only 30-40% of families in Russia have access to a mortgage, and the more children a couple has, the fewer opportunities there are to take out a housing loan.
According to him, subsidized rent in this sense makes it possible to realize the idea of improving housing conditions as children are born. It has not yet been fixed in regulatory legal acts, although it is the most important principle for solving demographic problems, Sergey Rybalchenko emphasizes.
— With the advent of each child, the provision of housing decreases: at the birth of the first — by 30%, when there are two children — by 50%, — the expert points out. — And if we are talking about a young family that does not yet have a high income, then, from my point of view, the easiest solution to the problem would be subsidized housing. Because even the housing program for young families, which subsidizes the purchase of housing, actually locks a young family in a one-room apartment for a long time, which becomes a barrier to the birth of the next children.
According to Sergey Rybalchenko's calculations, subsidized hiring can become an important tool for providing housing for about 60-70% of families. The federal project "Large family" of the national project "Family" for regions with an unfavorable demographic situation provides for state support for activities related to preferential housing for families in which the first or second child is born. But there are significant restrictions: families should need better housing conditions, and benefits of 50% (if there is one child) and 75% (if there are two children) are provided only until the child reaches the age of three. The expert is sure that the benefit should apply to the entire period of raising children, up to adulthood.
There are examples of similar programs in a number of subjects of the Russian Federation: in particular, in the Sakhalin Region, Primorsky Krai, and Mordovia. In this republic, it is also complemented by the possibility of buying back housing and writing off mortgage debt. Sergey Rybalchenko is confident that such a program "must definitely take off in terms of increasing the birth rate, primarily of third and subsequent children."
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