Eurasia Foundation: Osh-Konush Condo Story

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A Eurasia Foundation Grantee Profile

To Live like People:
Apartment Owners in the Kyrgyz Republic
Take Responsibility for their Buildings and Their Lives.

Kyrgyz Republic

Story and Photos by Jeff Erlich, Almaty Regional Office

The idea came from the basement. Over three summer months, a pool of sewage grew several feet deep under the residents of 17 Avtozavodskaya Street in Osh, the Kyrgyz Republic’s second city--and the residents waited in vain for government help. Determined to solve the problem, they turned to Kuvanishbek Turdubaev, director of the Osh-Konush Condominium Association, a Eurasia Foundation grantee.

"We didn’t know what to do," resident Gennady Galovatov says. "Then Kuvanish came here and talked about making our building a condominium association."

Meeting with Galovatov and his neighbors in front of their building, Turdubaev told them that if they formed a condominium association, they could pool their money and fix the pipe themselves. With most of them unemployed or living on pensions of $6 to $10 a month, the residents were reluctant to pay for what had always been a government responsibility, but—with the alternative being to live over an open cesspool—they agreed. In the fall of 1999, thanks to Turdubaev’s legal and management training,
17 Avtozavodskaya Street became the Sunrise Condominium. The residents then elected Galovatov their president. They hired a plumber to fix the pipe, and pumped out the water and cleaned the basement themselves.

Nearly two years later, the tenants of Sunrise have also cleared the trash away from their apartment building, dug a drainage ditch so that their yard no longer turns to mud in the rain, and lit their stairwells (one light bulb every two floors, with the purchase price neatly recorded in Sunrise’s books). Next, they plan to paint the stairwells. This is hardly paradise, and the $16 a month collected in dues is far from the $2,000 needed to fix the roof, but without the association, Galovatov says, "this building would be in ruins in ten years."

After the Soviet Union ended and the Kyrgyz Republic became independent, residents got title to their apartments. Neglected in the rush to privatize, though, was deciding who owned the common areas—the basements, roofs, stairwells, yards, pipes, cables, and everything else that holds a building together. "What have residents done? They’ve put gold wallpaper and silver floors in their apartments," explains Turdubaev, "but in the stairwells, basements, roofs, they don’t do a thing. That means that the person on the top floor has to fix the leaky roof, and one person can’t do that."

Not every apartment building has had the kind of crisis that precipitated the creation of Sunrise. "In the beginning, I would literally get into fistfights," Turdubaev says. "No one has any money, but to save their buildings, people have got to get together and ask each other: Do you want to have a normal life?" He sits behind a desk he built himself. Behind him is a picture of his parents and eight of his ten brothers and sisters. The computer he uses to research condominiums on the Internet is borrowed. He says that in three years, he has not received a single tyiyn (1/50th of a cent) from the government, nor can he ask association members to pay him, as they have barely enough money themselves.

In 1998, after twenty-one years in government, Turdubaev left his position as director of housing for the Osh region, in the Ferghana Valley, to start Osh-Konush. He was fed up, he says, with a bureaucracy whose main function had been reduced to looking after itself. He started three condominium associations and a year later, in June 1999, received a $10,572 grant from the Eurasia Foundation to train apartment residents in the legal and managerial aspects of running a condominium. In addition to the Eurasia Foundation, two other American organizations funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the International City/County Management Association and the Urban Institute, have helped Turdubaev with training and technical assistance. The Eurasia Foundation saw in this project a chance for citizens to shed the Soviet-era mentality that government is responsible for everything and begin governing themselves; it agreed with Turdubaev to set a target of starting twenty condominium associations.

Today there are 72 such groups, with 156 buildings and nearly 10,000 residents, but Turdubaev’s goal is for every one of Osh’s 1,089 apartment buildings to become condominiums. He has pursued this goal with missionary zeal, and his work has spread to the nearby towns of Uzgen and Kara-Suu. His work has inspired similar movements in the cities of Chu-Tokmok, Jalal-Abad, and Bishkek, the capital. After three years with Osh-Konush, however, he is thinking about finding a job with a salary.

At the Sunbeam condominium, the association president, Larisa Kramsky, is using the legal training Osh-Konush provided to fight for the land adjacent to her apartment building. The four stores on the ground floor have title to the surrounding land, despite a law that says land must be divided among all a building’s residents, not just those with street access. While the battle continues—"worse than a war," Kramsky says—the residents have posted a railing twenty meters out from the building, blocking trucks and cars from parking and making room for children to play and pensioners to sit in the fresh air.

Anara Khonushbaeva, president of the Turmush condominium association, is putting her management training to use, to help stretch her condominium’s monthly fee of one penny per square meter. First, she organized residents into crews to clear out the trash that had accumulated in the basements of Turmush’s two buildings. Then, she made a duty roster for residents to take turns cleaning the stairwells and appointed a supervisor for each one. She has appealed to the young men from the neighboring sports hall to not use the buildings’ yard as a bathroom. And her own innovation has been to paint the light bulbs in the stairwells blue to keep them from being stolen and resold in the bazaar. Still, she was unable to stop the disappearance one night of a streetlight that illuminates the yard; and she knows that with scrap aluminum bringing a good price, it may be difficult to hold on to its replacement.

On the way to the Algabas condominium, Turdubaev takes a short detour to show a building where he has been by turns cajoling and berating the residents to start a condominium association. Nothing blocks the entrances to the basement, which has been filled to the windows with trash. In one stairwell, exposed electrical wires are tangled in a corner.

Next door, at Algaabas, condominium president Mavzhuda Batirova says hello to pensioners sitting by residents’ gardens. She shows off the doors that the residents added to the entrances of the basement of the condominium’s twelve buildings after removing the garbage. "Kids used to shout up to their mothers to open the door before coming up, so they wouldn’t have to stand in the stairwell with that stench," Batirova says. Despite the improvements, it was hard at first to get people to form the condominium. "If they don’t get their pensions, they don’t want to pay," Batirova says with sympathy.

At the TSJ condominium, the problem is too much popularity. As one of the first associations in Osh, it has grown from three buildings to twelve. The Association President, Shergaziev Orozbai, already works full-time, yet another three buildings are asking to join. While such a large association may prove unwieldy, it also has advantages. Orozbai is looking into opening a youth center, and with so many residents, TSJ has a ready pool of workers to contribute labor in place of fees.

On the outskirts of town, Turdubaev points out a neighborhood of large private homes, many still being built. "Government and business tycoons," he says. "See what people can do if they have money and the freedom to build." For Osh-Konush’s members, though, their ambitions will have to be humbler, as people here say, "to live like people."

June 2001