There is a supermarket on the corner of an expensive Moscow residential street full of magnificent buildings in the Stalinist confectioner style.

Not a high-end store with imported goods, as can be found everywhere in the center of the city, but a discount store with bright lights, shrill advertising and long queues in front of the cash registers in the evening because there are too few staff or no one wants to buy a new one to open.

People shop here that one would not necessarily expect in this quarter: poorly dressed pensioners who load potatoes and onions into their wagons;

Men who get beer and dried fish.

There seems to be no trace of gentrification.

Katharina Wagner

Business correspondent for Russia and the CIS based in Moscow.

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They can be found elsewhere, in Moscow's finest areas around the Kremlin, where buying old apartments and houses, renovating and reselling them is worthwhile. But no sooner have you left the inner core of the capital than the residential areas are pleasantly mixed. This is thanks to the chaotic privatization of the housing market in the early 1990s: After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russians who had rented their apartments from the state for little money were able to buy them for a symbolic price. The fact that real estate - for many the first valuable private property ever - even in the turmoil of the nineties, despite currency collapse and hyperinflation, did not lose value drastically, did not melt away like savings in the bank, was burned into society.To this day it is the goal of every Russian to own an apartment, at the latest when starting a family. Anyone who has to rent is viewed with pity.

Construction is going on everywhere on the outskirts

The Russian rental market is divided into two parts: For foreign business people there are few, often absurdly expensive apartments with gold taps and brocade curtains in Moscow and Saint Petersburg that can be rented legally and officially.

Most of the rest are rooms or apartments that are rented from private to private, without taxes or contracts.

A tenant has no rights in this shadow market and can be shown outside the door at any time;

There are hardly any institutional landlords, as the market is nowhere near as lucrative as the purchase market.

That is why young Russian couples who want to move in together prefer to take out a mortgage and buy a one- or two-room apartment in a high-rise building on the outskirts. Since the emergence of the mortgage market in the mid-2000s, an astonishing trend has developed in this way, which seems to be the opposite of the overheated real estate market in industrialized countries: More and more Russians can afford their own apartment. The “Institute of the Urban Economy”, a Moscow consulting institute for real estate and urban development, has been researching since 2006 how many Russian families earn so much money that they can buy a 54-square-meter apartment and pay no more than 35 percent of the money for a mortgage have to spend monthly expenses. In 2006 it was only 18.6 percent; in 2020 almost 56 percent.A family currently only has to earn the equivalent of around 900 euros a month to be able to afford an apartment.

How great the demand is can be seen on the outskirts of Moscow: high-rise housing estates are shooting up everywhere, cranes are in huge excavation pits.

Almost every advertisement on the motorway has to do with buying a home - either mortgages are promised on the best terms or great living comfort, green courtyards and great views from the 25th floor.

Dozens of new projects are advertised on the website of Russia's largest residential construction company, PIK, for the capital alone;

Whole so-called micro-urban districts are emerging, with huge, unadorned residential towers, in between kindergartens, schools, polyclinics and shopping centers, conveniently located on expressways that bring you to the next metro station.