Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko has backed the proposal to transfer the ownership of a 40-apartment tenement building located in Plekhanova Street in Minsk to OAO Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant (MZKT) free of charge, the Belarus President Administration told BelTA.

This building previously housed a hall of residence. MZKT was allowed to use it free of charge in 2013. The company financed redecoration and reconstruction of the building, converted it into a tenement house, and rented the apartments to employees.

MZKT Deputy Director General Pavel Oger explained: “In 2018 the house was commissioned and our workers moved in. The four-storey house has 40 apartments: 32 two-room apartments and 8 one-room ones. They are available for rent. It was previously owned by the state but used by the MZKT.”

Nevertheless, MZKT workers were unhappy about the rather high rent prices. The rent prices were calculated according to the standard norms and coefficients taking into account all the factors, including the location of the house. MZKT could not reduce rent prices for individual categories of its workers, including low-income ones.

Since the president authorized the transfer of the apartments into the ownership of MZKT, the company will be able to set its own rent prices, reduce them and offer other preferences to large families.

“A number of complaints about the cost of this rental houses were filed. As a way out we thought about asking the state to transfer the ownership to us. This is why we've invested the company's money in this housing,” Pavel Oger noted.

MZKT expects that this measure will allow dealing with the problem of housing shortage for highly qualified specialists more flexibly. It is one of the components in the efforts to improve housing conditions for MZKT personnel. Renting one of the apartments still keeps families on the housing register and they will be able to build housing of their own in the future.