Dmitry Vandyukov: ‘Our biggest pain is the lack of housing’
Innopolis summed up the results of the first 10 years of life
The most technologically advanced and youngest city in Russia, Innopolis, celebrated its 10th anniversary on 9 June. Before this, jurnalists were presented with the results of the city's activities and identified problem areas. The most acute pain is the lack of housing — more than 150 families are already on the waiting list. And without new construction, the development of Innopolis will come to a standstill. Read more about it in the report of Realnoe Vremya.
Volume of company investments — 214 billion rubles
The total volume of company investments in the territory of the Innopolis special economic zone has reached 214 billion rubles. The revenue of the companies participating in the SEZ last year exceeded 64 billion rubles, tax revenues to the budgets — about 14 billion. The mayor of Innopolis Dmitry Vandyukov boasted about these figures at a meeting with journalists dedicated to the upcoming birthday of the city.
“Now the city is self-sufficient — we actually live on what we earn in taxes. We support the entire infrastructure with this money,” he shared.
As Deputy Prime Minister of Tatarstan Roman Shaikhutdinov, who supervises the IT city project, added, Innopolis has begun to work in the plus, bringing added value to the gross product of the republic.
“When new technological solutions are produced that are not yet ready for mass production throughout the country, they can be tested in a small city. And here, in fact, all the attributes of a city are — road networks, all the necessary infrastructure. That is why new solutions are produced here!” he noted.
According to Vandyukov, there are currently about 50 dynamic companies in the city, some of which have potential for international expansion:
“About 30 companies have the potential to develop in the near future. Let's give them a little more time. It's clear that we haven't grown 1C in 10 years...”
“But 1C is already more than 30 years old,” Shaikhutdinov continued. “Somewhere around 50 companies are replicating their solutions throughout the country. Technological projects don't develop immediately. This is a progressive movement. Genesis requires a large amount of time investment.”
“Until housing appears, the number of residents will not increase”
Despite the active pace of technological development of Innopolis, the city has a very acute problem with housing — more than 150 families are on the waiting list, Shaikhutdinov outlined the problem.
“Our main problem is the lack of housing. Everyone pays attention to this: “How is it that you have 10.5 thousand jobs created, and 7.5 live there.” We have a fairly long waiting list for rental housing, people have nowhere to go and nowhere to live. We have the “U” quarter, business-class housing. But it is not cheap. 11 queues are planned, one queue is ready,” complained Vandyukov.
He specified that at the moment about 265,000 square meters of housing have been built in the city. Of these, about 160,000 are rental. Considering the volumes of water and heating networks, according to him, these figures can be doubled:
“Innopolis is built up by 8%. We have such a field for creativity for architects and developers. The master plan was clarified with the Institute of Spatial Planning. We know exactly where we will have housing, where social facilities are, what road infrastructure. God willing, this year we will complete the general plan in accordance with the master plan. We think that we will adopt the general plan next year.
5,000 people live in the town on a permanent basis, another 2,500 work in Innopolis on a rotational basis. As Vandyukov noted, “unfortunately, even these 2,500 have nowhere to live.”
“There is a strong demand for housing here. For our residents, an apartment here is a certain psychological anchor. Therefore, the issue of developing both rental and private housing with a cost of up to 150,000 rubles per square meter is acute. Now these issues are being actively discussed with the leadership of the republic. We will solve this issue now, several strategies are already ready,” Shaikhutdinov convinced.
Something that we did not even dream of
But retail is doing well, Shaikhutdinov said in a conversation with Realnoe Vremya. According to him, the average bill at the points of the largest players in the food market in Innopolis is one of the highest in Russia:
“If you walk around the city, you can see that there are no places on the first floors of buildings — everything is occupied by entrepreneurs. Even if some projects are closed, new ones very quickly take their place. This is a question of whether the company is ready to focus on the specifics of Innopolis. The strongest survives.”
Summing up the results of 10 years, you can see how the implementation bypassed the original project. Many points for development appeared that were not initially envisaged.
“We assumed that this would be a city with a good university, with technological development. As a result, a production block was added to this: electronic means and domestic technologies in the field of communications, in the field of computing systems. We didn’t even imagine that we would form such a team,” the deputy prime minister told Realnoe Vremya.
