If there was no vacant housing stock, then apartments would not be put up for sale.
According to the State Statistics Service, there are no vacant apartments in Ukraine to allocate for rent for the needs of displaced persons. However, experts believe that the statistics, at least, do not reflect the real situation. As Georgy Mohylnyi, an expert on urban planning, writes in the article “Invisible apartments, or Why the government does not centrally rent housing for displaced persons” even a superficial analysis of the State Statistics Service's data on the housing stock makes it possible to detect very significant manipulations of indicators .
So, according to official statistics, as of January 1, 2021, there were only 4,300 unoccupied apartments in cities (500 of them in Kyiv). There is a significant number of vacant apartments (or old private houses) only in villages — more than 470,000. One vacant apartment in the cities for 2.5 thousand existing ones is a crazy shortage of housing. And it makes no sense to look for these apartments to provide less than 1% of the housing needs for displaced people.
As the author of the article notes, in the case of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol, the State Statistics Service acted logically: statistical data for Ukraine do not take these territories into account at all, with an indication of the reason.
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“But with ORDLO, something went wrong: the State Statistics Service takes some of the indicators for them into account, and some does not. Among the basic indicators on the subject of this article are the population and the housing stock. The population of ORDLO State Statistics somehow counts, but the housing fund does not. As a result, instead of science, a kind of alchemy came out, because housing provision in Ukraine is calculated taking into account approximately three million residents of ORDLO and those who left there for Russia, and about 1.7 million apartments with an area of 90 million square meters. m (9% of the entire housing stock of the country) was lost. The error due to this approach of the State Statistics Service is more than 2 square meters. m per person, and this is almost like a statistical lag between our country and Poland,” he notes.
In the opinion of the author, it is necessary to put order in the data on the country's housing stock. At the same time, there will certainly be options for renting housing for IDPs. Because if there was no such opportunity, there would be no offers for the sale of apartments, and there are enough of such offers.
