ASTANA – Providing young families with a place to live is one of the tenets of the Affordable Housing 2020 programme. The programme began accepting applications at Centres for Population Services (CPS) on June 2.
“The selection will be made on a point system. It allows or 20 points to be accrued for the first child and 30 points for each subsequent child. The commission will consider applicants’ right to property ownership in Kazakhstan and any foreclosures that they may have experienced during the past five years,” Deputy Head of the Housing Department of Astana Ruslan Akhmetov said.
The housing department will grant 10 points for each disabled or chronically ill family member , five points to applicants not included on the list for housing in the previous selections under government programmes,10 points for each spouse who was orphaned and parentless people under 29 years of age who lost their parents before reaching adulthood.
“District CPSs will accept applications until June 14 without interruption, according to the criteria put forward earlier,” Ruslan Besheyev, the head of the Department for Public Service Compliance Quality Control, said.
This year, 672 families will receive new apartments. In order to apply for housing, families must have children of at least two years of age and be headed by spouses no older than 29. The same rules apply to single parent families as long as they have been registered as living in Astana for at least two years.
All regions of Kazakhstan enacted the Affordable Housing 2020 programme in 2012; under it, 63 million square metres of housing will be built in the country by 2020; 35 million square metres of secondary housing will be modernised and the share of domestically produced building materials on the domestic market will be increased from 65 to 90 percent.
Affordable Housing 2020 includes the pilot project “Regeneration of Astana’s Urban Environment.” It calls for the demolition of more than 200,000 square metres of dilapidated housing and the construction of 608,000 square metres of new housing, including 12,000 apartments, 4,070 of which will be replacing what was demolished.
