Ice Home

Ub Post

February 1, 2011

There is an ice hotel in Japanese northern island of Hokkaido, which is said to be making a good profit. Though a single room with ice bed, ice table and ice seat costs US$500 per night, all rooms were occupied many months ago. Such a kind of demand can be a good opportunity for residents of Ulaanbaatar City.

It is enough for us to invite all Japanese people willing to stay in ice hotel and let them stay in our homes.

Ulaanbaatar residents will surely get rich only by charging $100 per person while suffering no expense. You may ask why? The answer is the most of 130 thousand apartments in the city is as cold as that Japan’s ice hotel.

The majority of apartment residents in Ulaanbaatar suffer the cold below minus 13 degrees, living like a хөрвийн аргаар. We stay home in outerwear and go to bed not taking off dress. Young children get sick and get pneumonia. Going out, we are hit by poisonous smoke.

Residents from khoroos No.3 and 4 in Sukhbaatar District went through all administrative levels to deliver their complaints about this problem, but their effort yielded no results.

Their apartments have no heating and they reside in ice halls. Offices in charge of apartment management and maintenance and heating supply bodies always blame each other for such inconvenience, while they still dare to take whole heating fee almost forcefully.

Heating system body is in charge of main systems of the city, apartment maintenance bodies are in charge of branch systems and apartment owners association is responsible for vertical systems. Residents pay for maintenance costs of all systems, after which these bodies share the money.

It has been a long time since these bodies freeze consumers instead of heating in return for the money which consumers pay. Erecting a new building in every space available in a particular area, without any planning, causes overload for heating system.

Officials from central, metropolitan and district administrations are believed to behind all these shelters. If to investigate the reason of such ice houses, irresponsible and negligent activities of officials from bodies in charge of heat supply will be exposed.

Since their activity is not open and transparent, consumers suffer, while particular officials make profit from it.

Instead of performing their duties borne before the public, they put their personal interest before the public one, causing the conflict of interests.

For instance, Apartment Maintenance and Public Utility Office #1 responsible for 14163 persons from 465 families in 100 apartment buildings with total area of 192.3 thousand square meter and 330 business entities and organizations and three big centers located in the territory of khoroos No.1,2,3,4 and 5 in Sukhbaatar District, was privatized and re-structured as “SUN COMFORT” LLC. In principle, this company must be a shareholding one, not a private one.

Income and expenditure statements of that and other similar companies should be open to the public. Residents should know how much of total income is paid to heating system, how much is spent to repair and replace pipelines.

Everybody understands that a money owner must know where their money is stored and how it is spent. Exactly such a requirement must be in place for all apartment owners associations.

All bodies have possibilities of administering their respective websites displaying all these information and updating it on daily basis. Such an activity is cheaper than a mobile phone.

The only thing the city and district authorities did in the past, instead of administering and managing such actions, was to find empty land space in order to sell it for personal interest.

The city and district authorities had no interest to make the information open to the public from the first beginning when apartment maintenance and public utility bodies were privatized.

They never had a desire and willingness to make public governance transparent and they are happy when information is closed and not understandable to residents. The main reason is that city and local authorities are not elected by residents, but appointed by political party.

For them, it is a sole purpose to serve for their political party not for residents.

It is because they are replaceable not by residents but only by party head.

The question is which temperature degree the residents live and how many of them is at risk of freezing to death is just statistics for them. Few people are playing with lives of our Ulaanbaatar residents this way.

It has been many years since the most of us feel cold no matter we are home or outside, are poisoned by poisonous smoke and traveling in a frozen bus. How many winters we must pass further in this way?

Translated by P.Shinebayar