MOSCOW, August 1. /TASS/. Slightly more than 5,000 Soviet-era low-rise apartment blocks in Moscow have been incorporated into the so-called housing renovation program, Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Tuesday.

"A total of 5,100 dwelling houses have been included in the renovation program. The list is available at the Moscow mayor’s official website www.mos.ru," he said at a city government meeting.

Meanwhile, Sobyanin’s deputy in charge of urban planning, Marat Khusnullin, told journalists plans are in the store to earmark about 200 billion rubles (3.33 billion US dollars) from the city budget to build houses to resettle inhabitants from the capital’s Khrushchev-era five-storey apartment house blocks built in the 1950s and 1960s under the then Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, slated for demolition first.

The capital’s housing renovation program was unveiled in early 2017 when President Vladimir Putin instructed Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin to demolish Soviet-era five-story apartment blocks to make way for new apartment buildings. Plans are underway to clear some 25 million square meters of dwellings under the 10-to 15-year program.

A bill regulating the resettling procedures was submitted to the Russian State Duma (lower house) in early March and passed in third reading on June 14. On July 1, 2017, President Putin signed the amendments to the law on Moscow’s status as the capital city and thereby endorsed its housing renovation program.

Residents of such dwellings were offered to vote on the inclusion of their homes to the program from May 15 to June 15. More than two-thirds of votes were needed for a house to be included in the program. The initial list contained 4,546 houses that were slated to be demolished. More than 460 of them have opted out of the program.