The Russian dream

Pic here.

Bloomberg Businessweek piece.

It is one of the great memories of living in the USSR in 1985:  everybody was in apartments and nobody really to have a house, unless you were rich or connected and had the dacha.

Well, here's Medvedev bitching about the same almost two decades later, noting that 77% of the country's 142 million live in apartment blocks.  

So here's the modern equivalent of Lincoln's land give-away (the Homestead Act), as Russia has amassed almost 2.5m acres to "seed the land with single-family homes."

Says the guy who runs the government's fund to promote housing:  "The person who has something to defend is a different kind of person."

Amen.