Posted on 07/19/2005 1:13:40 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Imagine yourself sitting at home, unable to move because you are nursing a broken leg. Suddenly you hear a roar outside... and realise a bulldozer is attacking your front porch.
This is what happened to Alexei Syomov, who thought he owned his home in Gavrikovo, just outside Moscow.
Speaking in front of the huge apartment block that now stands on the site of his wooden house, he says: "They took all of my furniture out. Then they began destroying the house. After a couple of minutes the place where it stood was flat."
By "they", he refers to bureaucrats who, he claims, stood to profit from developing the valuable land his house was standing on.
This is a side of the Moscow property market virtually unknown to the West.
Multi-billion-dollar housing scams have become big business in Russia.
And despite President Vladimir Putin's promise to institute a dictatorship of the rule of law, these scams are all too often shrugged off by the authorities.
Autocratic inheritance
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there followed the biggest smash-and-grab free-for-all in modern history.
Who owned everything up until then? The ministry buildings, the industries, mineral resources, hotels, palaces, sanitaria, the money?
The Soviet Union and the Communist Party did of course.
But they did not exist any more.
Everything that was not nailed down - and much of what was - was privatised; which usually meant stolen.
Only then were private rights extended to ordinary people, those who lived in apartments and dachas (summer cottages), which previously had been in the gift of the state.
The Tsar, or latterly the Communist Party, granted individuals the right to own private property, but these rights could easily be revoked and had few legal guarantees.
What is happening in Putin's Russia reflects this autocratic inheritance.
Paradox
"Property is theft," said Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the 19th-Century French socialist. And many ordinary Russians would agree that theft is the fastest and cheapest way to get hold of property in Moscow today.
Grigori Yavlinski, a leading liberal reformer, told the BBC: "Still in Russia we have a system in which private property is conditional. People have no confidence in private property rights because the enforcement of laws is very weak."
But there is a paradox.
Putin's government is also promoting private property by land transfers and mortgages. And judging by Moscow's booming real-estate market, this policy is succeeding.
With the capital now a thriving oil and gas town - a sort of Houston on the Moskva river - and with people and businesses flocking in from all over the country, property values rose about 40% last year.
Rampant development
The rocketing real estate values, however, are also threatening Moscow's architectural heritage.
Old buildings in prime locations are attracting the developers' attention.
Stanislavski 2 is a small restaurant in a part of central Moscow that has been largely destroyed by rampant development under the direction of the city's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov.
The restaurant was Russia's first private restaurant and has now been operating for 17 years, run by Emilia Souptel and her mother Rozalia.
The two women are currently fighting a threatened takeover by a developer, whose office is in a building next door to the restaurant.
He refused to speak to the BBC, saying his business affairs were "too complicated" to discuss.
But his method, say Emilia and Rozalia, is quite simple: he is trying to force them out by arguing that a new law has overridden the one under which they bought the property.
"I bought this restaurant legally," says Rozalia. "Today we have a new law cancelling the previous law. Tomorrow there will be yet another law cancelling the present one.
"We don't have laws in this country. It's lawless, it's a complete mess. There'll never be private property here, it's not possible."
The sheer scale of repossession of assets, carried out through seemingly simple mechanisms - and often oiled by the easily corruptible judicial system - raises the question of whether the Russian government is able, or indeed willing, to control this alarming trend.
The new insecurity of property is therefore at the very heart of Putin's much-vaunted reforms.
Sounds like New London, Connecticut.
LQ
The new nightmare of every American property owner from here on.
Ha, hardly, this is now the law of the land in much of our America, or did you miss that little Supreme Court decision?
Ah, see what it's like to live in a country where you don't have a constitutional right to private property. Wait, you probably already live in such a country. Thank you justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer and especially Kennedy.
My thoughts as well. Here is the future of the US.
This is what happened to Alexei Syomov, who thought he owned his home in Gavrikovo, just outside Moscow.
Speaking in front of the huge apartment block that now stands on the site of his wooden house, he says: "They took all of my furniture out. Then they began destroying the house. After a couple of minutes the place where it stood was flat."
By "they", he refers to bureaucrats who, he claims, stood to profit from developing the valuable land his house was standing on
Compare and contrast with this story from FOX News about 1 month ago
ST. LOUIS — Reba Thompson's home in South St. Louis has a well-manicured lawn and a charming front porch, but it's surrounded by turmoil.
That's because what was once a neighborhood is now a construction zone.
Thompson, 79, and her son Howard are standing their ground after 19 of their former neighbors sold their land and moved out to make way for a $40 million shopping center.
"It's not about the money. Mom wants her home," said Howard Thompson.
After living there for over 70 years, the family refuses to surrender the land. Thompson showed her resolve by rejecting the developers' buyout, but the developers began construction on the shopping center anyway. They fenced in the Thompson home and began construction around it.
"My whole family has worked hard to keep it nice so I could pass it down, and now they want to tear it down," said Reba Thompson.
The city is trying to seize the Thompson property through eminent domain (search), claiming the home is in a blighted area that needs the economic help of a shopping center. St. Louis officials consider the shopping center an essential part of the city's redevelopment effort, because citizens shouldn't be forced to do their shopping in the suburbs.
"We empathize with what they're going through. But we feel many more people will be helped by this project and projects like it," said Jeff Rainford (search), chief of staff to St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay.
Following a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, cities have the right to seize homeowners' land if they think it will benefit an area economically — even if the aid will be from private businesses and not public programs.
"Somebody's best shot is to prove that the city officials that condemned the property were in the back pocket of the developer that wanted the design," said Eric Claeys (search), assistant professor of law at St. Louis University (search) Law School.
The Thompsons say they will fight the case, even though the city's plan seems inevitable in light of the Supreme Court ruling.
The only real difference seems to be in Russia they just went ahead and did it without even the pretense of a legal proceeding, we in America are still pretending that we are protected by due process of law.
This scenario is not so far fetched if the SCOTUS continues with their destruction of private property rights in our Constitution.
You can say you own the property, throw a party when the mortgage is paid off and spend oodles of cash for oak floors, marble bathroom walls and insulated windows. You might even love your house, but it’s not really yours. Because anyday the government can knock on your door and say, “Here come the bulldozers.”
Kelo v New London
Try missing a single rent, er tax payment to your landlord, Uncle, and see how quickly the muscle in the IRS will come and take "your" property.
Check back 100 or 200 years and you might find that property rights mean property rights of large and productive landholders. The little guy in his cottage with a garden was never the focus of property rights. That's right, property rights are for the aristocracy and manufacturers. Not commerce, though; property rights have nothing to do with the class involved in commerce. If you are a multi-millionaire maybe you will get to go to Congress to help protect the property rights of the multi-millionaires. Populism never amounted to much even if some Democrats still mouth those platitudes--our newest biggest minority might want to pay attention or they will be disappointed just like all the rest who came before. Just sit in your apartment and watch Reality TV, that's as close as you will get to reality.
You apparently have no experience in the realm of tennant law.
It is very difficult to evict.
But it is a shame that the SCOTUS ruling does take us closer to the treachory that has existed in Russia for so many years.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.