In an effort to increase their living space and remove clutter from their apartments, residents of apartment buildings are moving beyond their homes. To store things, storerooms are organized on the sites and in the basements of houses. In some cases, this causes outrage from neighbors. Study the current legislation in order to understand whether storage rooms in hallways and basements are legal, how to properly organize and equip them, and who bears what responsibility for identified violations. The issue of arranging an additional room for storing things is regulated by the Housing Code of the Russian Federation, SanPin, SNiP and Technical Regulations on Fire Safety Rules.
How to coordinate and legitimize a storage room
The areas of the apartments belong to their owners on the right of private ownership, under a social tenancy agreement, etc. The remaining communications and non-residential premises of the building are in the common shared ownership of all apartment owners, including basements, attics, staircases, etc.
The issue of storage room equipment does not arise if the developer has built strollers on the first floors of a multi-storey building, and the data is reflected in the technical documentation of the building. Any apartment owner living in the building can use the wheelchair.
Important! On the ground floor of the building you can arrange a small room with a sink for storing cleaning equipment. Most often, the room is used by HOA employees who monitor the cleanliness of the house.
The decision to install additional storage rooms is made by the owners of the premises at a general meeting. When considering the issue, they proceed from the principles of safety and accessibility of use of common property, i.e. storage rooms should not impede access to emergency exits, garbage chutes, elevators, etc. All owners of apartments in the building must give consent to the arrangement of a storage room. The right to use storage facilities belongs to all owners of apartments in the building. If the owners of one apartment spent money and set up a storage room on the site in the entrance, this does not mean that they are the sole owners of the non-residential premises. If a dispute arises, it will be difficult to defend your right.
Legal side of the issue
According to the Entryway Negligence Act 2021, if a neighbor leaves their rubbish on the site in the hope that the cleaner will pick it up, they will face a fine. If this act caused harm to someone else’s health or property, we are talking about more serious liability.
The law prohibits:
- Equip a storage room or utility room in the entrance.
- Block the landing and fire exits with various large objects.
- Store furniture or materials that ignite easily on the site.
When trying to figure out how to deal with neighbors who leave garbage, it is worth mentioning that the following types of legal liability are provided for violation of these standards.
Administrative
The presence of fines for polluting common spaces implies administrative liability. This is indicated in the domestic government decree “On the fire safety regime”.
It lists a list of restrictions. In addition to ordinary household waste, it is prohibited to leave the following on the sites:
- plumbing;
- broken pieces of furniture;
- rubbish after renovation.
All this should be thrown into a special container. Its residents must order at their own expense if they are making repairs at home.
A fine for littering at the entrance (both construction and household) can be fined in the amount of 500-3000 rubles. According to Art. 6.4, even for a small bag of garbage a fine of up to a thousand rubles may be imposed. If the waste can easily catch fire, the payment is 2-3 thousand rubles. If we are talking about legal entities, they will have to pay up to 250 thousand rubles!
According to Art. 8.1, for organizing an unauthorized dump not only in the entrance, but also next to it, the culprit will be fined up to 2,000 rubles.
Once it is clarified who should pay and how much, violations often stop. In accordance with the resolution of the domestic State Construction Committee No. 170, all waste must be stored exclusively in places specially designated for this purpose. These are tanks, containers and specially equipped landfills. By law, they must be located at least a hundred meters from the entrance.
Interestingly, legal requirements may vary from country to country. For example, the article of the Republic of Kazakhstan provides for a penalty of up to 4,000 rubles. or even arrest for ten days.
Criminal
Irresponsible residents are responsible for their garbage in the entrance until it moves to a landfill.
If the trash caused such serious problems as fire, poisoning, significant damage to the environmental situation, or injury to residents, then in this case criminal liability already applies. Punishment is imprisonment for up to eight years. In addition, all victims must be paid compensation for the damage caused in full. This is mentioned in Art. 59 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation.
Everyone knows the simple truth - ignorance of the rules does not exempt the culprit from punishment. Legal regulations, norms and rules are the same for everyone.
Storerooms on the site at the entrance
The legality of storage rooms on staircase landings is regulated by the following standards.
SanPiN 2.1.2.2645-10 assumes the presence of storage rooms in apartment buildings at the rate of 3 square meters. m per person for storing vegetables, solid fuel, but the exit from the storerooms should be separate from the living quarters.
Clause 4.10. SNiP 01/31/2003 allows for the extension or installation of public technical premises for storing equipment up to the third floor of the building. Storerooms above the specified number of storeys may be considered illegal. Storage of flammable and flammable substances and household items is prohibited.
A storage room cannot be installed under the first staircase; the place is intended to house important communications of the house - heating units, water supply, electrical panels, etc.
Changes made to the structure of the building must be agreed upon with the BTI, fire inspection, included in the technical documentation and reflected in the house plan. Otherwise, fire inspectors will impose a fine on the organizers of unapproved storage areas, as well as the management company or HOA. Be prepared for the fact that the HOA, without waiting for orders and fines, dismantles illegal storage rooms on landings. It is impossible to legally sell or rent out a storage room that has been approved by all authorities, since the storage space is a public facility. When buying an apartment, do not pay attention to the fact that the previous owners of the apartment offer to purchase a storage room on the site. Most often, the premises are not legalized.
Where to go for help
Now you need to figure out where to go and the possible fine. First of all, you need to go to Rospotrebnadzor. You can submit the document yourself, send it by letter, or write a message on the company’s website. This is the best choice, because this authority specifically controls the sanitary situation in residential buildings and in the surrounding area.
Additionally, you can complain to the following organizations:
- Fire supervision and the Ministry of Emergency Situations - after the inspection they will issue warnings, and later they may be punished with a fine;
- police station - you need to write a statement addressed to the local police officer and send the case for trial;
- district administrative authority - a special commission is created, and its task is to call the slob to account. But this will require the testimony of at least a couple of people;
- Roskomnadzor - will check the suspect and impose fines;
- controlling company – will create the necessary act and conduct a preventive conversation with the violator.
Storage rooms in the basement
If it is not easy to arrange storage rooms in the entrances, then apartment owners turn to the basements of buildings and the underground spaces of a residential building. Often, developers promise to organize warehouses for storing things and, after putting the building into operation, they sell storage rooms in the basement for a fee. In order to understand how legal and correctly the storage space is organized and whether the demolition of such a storage room will result in fines and expenses in the future, look into this issue carefully.
The legislator gives the following interpretation of a basement - a room whose floor is below ground level by more than half the height of the wall. The entrance must be separated from the residential part of the building. So that firefighters do not have questions, there must be at least 2 entrances, one of which is a door 0.75x1.5 meters or a hatch 0.6x0.8 meters, and the second is a full-fledged emergency exit to the outside.
It is also necessary to have at least 2 windows with dimensions no less than 0.9 * 1.2 meters with pits for access to the premises in case of fire. Additional requirements are put forward for partitions, namely the degree of fire resistance of the building and its number of floors. In buildings up to 5 floors inclusive and fire resistance level 2, partitions can be installed without taking into account the fire hazard class. If the house is above 5 floors or, regardless of height, belongs to fire resistance degree 3 or 4, then choose materials for partitions that correspond to fire resistance type 1. It is best to build half red brick walls and not install wooden doors at the entrance to the pantry.
Important! Built-in storage rooms in the basement must be equipped with smoke removal systems. If the floor does not comply with the specified standards, the fire department recognizes it as a technical underground, and residents are denied access to storage rooms.
Storage sections installed in the basement should not interfere with access to the building's communications. It is prohibited to pass the sewer network through storage rooms. Storage is also limited to vegetables, household equipment and solid fuel.
Eggs under the door and complaints to the PDN commission
It is not only Kruglyaks who write complaints to all authorities. Half the entrance turned against the family. Neighbors sent collective complaints to the housing inspectorate. Over the past year, inspectors have already checked their apartment twice for illegal redevelopment. No violations were found.
At the end of February, first at the school where the nine-year-old daughter of the troublemakers is studying, and then at the family, the commission on juvenile affairs visited. People whose names appear in the court decision to vacate the storage rooms reported that the Kruglyak spouses do not fulfill parental responsibilities in raising the child. “They wrote that my father drinks, is rowdy and in general is almost a pedophile,” Svetlana is indignant. “The inspectors did not find anything that would indicate that we are bad parents, neither at school nor at our home. They said that this happens often when there are fights like this between neighbors.”
Half the entrance turned against a family that started a dispute over storage rooms: neighbors broke open mailboxes and threw eggs at the door. Photo: Sergey Lazovsky.
Before complaints, other methods of psychological influence were used. “You can immediately recognize our mailbox,” Alexander Kruglyak gives a tour of the entrance. - First, they broke one box, I took another cell - and it was broken. As a result, the management company allocated us a whole section of boxes.”
From time to time, instead of correspondence, the Kruglyaks take out garbage and “witty” gifts from the cell - a bottle of vodka or family panties. The latter with a hint of a case when a man jumped out of the apartment in the middle of the night because someone hit the door with a brick. “They threw raw eggs and used syringe needles under our door, and they soiled a child’s bicycle with eggs,” Svetlana lists.
“I won’t hide the fact that sometimes I also behaved incorrectly, my nerves got the better of me—all sorts of things happened.” We are naturally under pressure. Some residents found out my place of work and are trying to put pressure on me. Do you think this is a social issue or do I just want the pantry? - Alexander Kruglyak addressed the editors of the AP and, after a pause, added wearily: - I don’t want anything anymore, I want justice.
OPINION
Oksana Levitskaya, legal consultant of Amur Service Management Company LLC:
— When our management company took over this house, we recorded the presence of doors on the premises of the garbage chambers. In the technical passport submitted to the management company, these doors were not indicated in the diagrams, however, doorways were listed in these places, suggesting the presence of doors. In fact, there is no garbage disposal in a residential building. In the process of managing the house, the management company must update technical documentation based on actual data, including technical passports. A new technical passport for public places was ordered from the cadastral bureau. When preparing the document, the cadastral bureau reflected these doors. As a result of updating the technical documentation, the area of common areas has not changed. In the new technical data sheet for common areas, these premises were renamed storage rooms, which corresponded to their actual use. Based on the results of the State Housing Inspection inspection, no violations were identified.
In March last year, Alexander Kruglyak filed a lawsuit against Amur Service Management LLC to declare illegal the inaction to eliminate violations of housing legislation and fire safety requirements, and also demanded that the management company be obliged to bring the disputed premises into compliance with the Fire Safety Rules in the Russian Federation by dismantling storage rooms . The court did not satisfy the claims. The court confirmed that the doors installed on the staircases from the 2nd to the 9th floor in the fifth entrance were installed without violating the law and the management company should not dismantle them.
Sergey Molin, head of the State Housing Inspectorate of the Amur Region:
— The inspectorate’s position on this issue is one: according to the current legislation, common areas can be used by an individual owner only on the basis of a decision of the general meeting of owners of an apartment building. There was no such meeting and decision at Krasnoarmeyskaya, 82. The management company wasted money on the registration certificate. The doors were drawn in the documents, but the storage rooms are the common property of all owners.
If someone wants to occupy common property, they must pay for it. After all, this person reduces the area of common areas. Here the question goes to another plane - payment for one-time tax. All neighbors pay for the maintenance of the common property of their share, and some use the common area only for their own purposes.
The only way to legitimize the ownership of storage rooms is to make a decision at a general meeting of the house. If there is no peace and agreement and the owners do not agree to reduce the area of common areas, the courts will decide to clear these premises. After all, according to the law, without the decision of the general meeting of the house, you cannot even hang an air conditioner on the facade without permission.
“I believe that we must adhere to the law,” one of the illegal storage room owners shared his opinion. “We knew for sure that such a situation could happen. To be honest, I want to keep this candy for myself, if we can come to an agreement, find a playmate and use the storage room together.”
Consequences of illegal storage
Compliance with the rules and regulations is monitored by firefighters, employees of the Housing Inspectorate, the management company and the HOA. Before equipping a storage area on the site in the entrance or basement for your own needs, obtain the consent of all apartment owners in the building and consult with the indicated authorities. Register an attached or built-in storage room in accordance with all rules and regulations with the BTI and include it in the floor or house plan. Permitting documentation will save you from disputes with neighbors and spending money on fines and dismantling of illegal storage.
If fire inspectors identify violations during the construction of a storage facility, and the owners refuse to dismantle the illegal storage facility as ordered, representatives of these authorities may apply to the court to compel compliance. If the court sides with government officials, the owners of the illegal storage facility will additionally bear legal costs.
Do not buy storage space on landings in hallways and basements and do not enter into rental agreements until you are sure of the legality of the proposed construction in order to avoid unforeseen expenses in the future.
What information is needed to file a complaint?
Before contacting the appropriate authorities, please note that photo and video evidence is not enough. More detailed information is also needed:
- Full name of the offender;
- he owns the apartment where he lives or rents it.
If the “criminal” is the owner, the best way to obtain this data would be to contact the management company. If he rents an apartment, he needs to contact the owners directly.
If the property is rented, you may not have to complain - in nine out of ten cases the tenant is evicted.
