Housing conditions of the population

The chapter contains the information about the housing stock and its maintenance, the provision of population with accommodation, registered dwellings and equipping of inhabited localities with services and utilities.

The state statistical observation serves a source of information.

Housing stock is the set of residential dwellings for long-term residence. It comprises residential buildings, special dwellings (hostels, shelters, care homes for the aged and disabled adults and children, children’s homes, and children’s boarding homes and hostels), apartments, business quarters and other accommodation located in buildings suitable for living.

The housing stock excludes country houses, summer cottages, sport and tourist centres, motels, camping sites, sanatoria, rest facilities, boarding houses, guest houses, hotels, rail coaches and other seasonal and temporary lodgements irrespective of the time period spent there by visitors.

Total living space comprises the area of dwelling and auxiliary areas (excluding entry vestibules in single-unit dwellings) as well as area of verandas, terraces and balconies. The coefficients used to calculate space are: terraces and balconies – 0,3; for loggias – 0,5; glassed-in balconies – 0,8; verandes and glassed-in loggias – 1,0.

Auxiliary areas refer to kitchens, bath and shower rooms, toilets, corridors within an apartment, built-in stores and closets.

Apart from those mentioned above, the auxiliary premises of hostels are cultural and household facilities and those where medical services can be provided.

Total living space excludes the size of the following places:

staircases, lift halls, lobbies, general use corridors, halls, galleries;

uninhabited dwellings, occupied by establishments providing housing and communal services, shops, post-offices, children’s educational establishments, enterprises providing consumer services, etc.

Inhabited localities equipped with services and utilities are the ones with centralised water supply and sewage system, i.e. cities, towns, and rural type settlements and villages, where water pipes and some water supply networks provide water to the population to meet the communal and domestic wants while the sewage facilities take away, in a centralised way, waste waters from residential buildings and communal utilities.