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Many private homeowners live in now-privatized apartment blocks, such as this one in Tiraspol, the capital of Pridnestrovie

TIRASPOL (Tiraspol Times) - According to Parliament's press service, reforming the housing and communal services is a top priority for local legislator.

74% of housing in Pridnestrovie's capital Tiraspol is now privately owned, and with ownership comes rights and vested interests. Parliament has publicly recognized that the people are not satisfied with the quality of services being provided to homeowners, and seeks to involve the community by establishing home owners associations.

Current real estate law in the unrecognized country does not regulate organization and management of home owners associations. At the request of the new property-owning community, a Home Owners Associations Bill has been tabled by the Parliamentary Presidium with MP Alex Potolya (himself a newly minted homeowner) sponsoring the bill.

According to the parliamentary press service, the new law defines a home owners association as a non-profit organization of people living in apartment houses, members of housing cooperative societies and other associations of home owners. The bill also stipulates the procedure for setting up of home owners associations, the rights and duties of home owners and who can be members of the home owners associations.

An estimated 100 home owners associations currently exist throughout the length of Pridnestrovie (or Transnistria, as it is sometimes also called). A new fixture in civil society, these groups have been time-consuming to set up since no clear legislation exists in the field. This is now about to change.

Home owners organizing themselves in civil society

Parliamentarians expect that the new law will help civil society organize itself quicker and easier than it has been able to do in the past.

" - The adoption of the Bill will facilitate this," says Anatoly Kaminsky, Vice-Speaker of Parliament. "Organizations and home owners wishing to set up such associations now have to beat down the doors to obtain this right. But this new bill proposes a straightforward procedure for registration of home owners associations."

The members of the Presidium decided to include the Home Associations Bill into the agenda of the next plenary meeting scheduled for 30 May 2007.

" - It is no secret that this will lead to an explosion in home owners associations to protect the rights of everyone who owns private property," says a spokesman from the legislature. "Civil society is becoming more and more active every day, and this move will help them organize themselves even more."

Pridnestrovie - like Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh and Taiwan - have all the attributes of statehood except for external recognition. In the words of Nina Caspersen from the Department of Politics & International Relations at Lancaster University, this sets them apart from the opposite phenomenon of failed states or ‘quasi states’ which only survive because of external recognition, whereas ‘unrecognized states’ survive despite their lack of such recognition.

Thanks to a wave of recent market reforms, Pridnestrovie's capital now has one of the world's highest rates of private homeownership. At 74 percent, it exceeds the European average. It is also higher than in the United States, and is the foundation for a new property-owning middleclass. (With information from vspmr.org)

See also:
» 74% of all Tiraspol homes are now private property [1]