HOUSING VOUCHERS FOR CARE LEAVERS IN RUSSIA: OPPORTUNITIES AND BARRIERS IN THE REGULATORY FRAMEWORK FOR THEIR EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION

For a decade the public authorities in Russia have been failing to fulfill its obligations to young care leavers. The long-term waiting list for public housing is an acute problem of social policy in the country that requires new tools to be solved. Housing vouchers, or lump-sum social payments for the purchase of residential property, at the expense of the Russian regions’ budgets, are supposed to be one of them. The paper aims to evaluate the legal framework of the housing vouchers program from the perspective of opportunities and barriers it has for eliminating the problem. The study used data from the relevant laws and regulations covering all regions, where the housing vouchers were established from 2019 to 2023. The concept of performance-oriented social program and key factors influencing the access to public benefits constitute our theoretical framework. Within it, we examine the range of terms and conditions that should be met by applicants to successfully buy residential properties by means of the housing vouchers. Our findings show that the regulations concerning customer focus, providing lower thresholds for applicants, promoting awareness about the program and its entitlement criteria, and shortening the duration of administrative procedures are likely to contribute to the increase of program performance. On the contrary, barriers that prevent obtaining proper results are due to high transaction costs of claiming support, low purchasing power of payments in the housing market, tight restrictions on how recipients should dispose funds and excessively strict eligibility criteria.