Reconstruction or just documents: how 150 million hryvnias of the World Bank will be spent in Mykolaiv

What do we imagine when we hear that Mykolaiv has received 150 million hryvnias to rebuild residential buildings?

Construction cranes, workers wearing helmets, concrete mixers and restored apartments.

But the reality is different — this money will not be used to rebuild houses, but to create design and estimate documentation. This means hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages of drawings, tables, approvals and examinations. In other words, paper. Very expensive paper.

This is the case when Great Construction is giving way to Great Design. 

Moreover, while the cost of design in Ukraine is usually 10-15% of the total cost of construction, the implementation of these projects requires one or even one and a half billion hryvnias.

And this is at a time when the state budget is underfunded and the Armed Forces are estimated to lack about 300 billion hryvnias by the end of this year.

NikVesti investigated whether Mykolaiv officials will be able to effectively use 150 million hryvnias from the World Bank to restore housing under the «HOPE» project and which houses were included in the list.

Mykolaiv residents are waiting and hoping for reconstruction

One of the residential buildings included in the «HOPE» project stands dilapidated on Admiralska Street. Earlier, NikVesti wrote that its residents have not been able to return to their own apartments for three years after a Russian missile hit it in July 2023.

At the beginning of the war, almost no one lived in the building on Admiralska Street, as the hotel «Inhul» next door was destroyed by an air strike and residents were worried about possible repeated strikes.

Today, some people live abroad, others live in other regions of Ukraine or rent accommodation in Mykolaiv. However, residents are still confident that their homes will be restored and they will be able to return to their own homes, Viktor Zahorui, a resident of a destroyed high-rise building on Admiralska Street, told us.

«None of us wants compensation, we want to live in this house. Everyone is waiting and hoping for the reconstruction», he said.

The dilapidated building is now mothballed and fenced off. The roof has been covered to protect it from rain and further destruction.

«Great design» and «impressive amount»

The World Bank project, which selected 54 Mykolaiv houses, is called «HOPE: Housing repairs to restore people's rights and opportunities».

All of these high-rise buildings have been damaged by shelling in the last years of the war.

The resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers, under which Mykolaiv received donor funds, stipulates that 150 million hryvnias can only be spent on design. This means that the city has no legal ability to spend part of these funds on maintenance or even major repairs of any of these buildings: only drawings, estimates, and documentation.

So far, no tender for project development has been announced, the Department of Housing and Communal Services said in response to an information request NikVesti. Documents are currently being prepared to select specialists and organisations that will develop these projects.

At the same time, there will be no «classic» tenders in the ProZorro system. The winners will be determined according to the World Bank's rules, and only then will they be announced in the «News» section, the Mykolaiv Housing and Communal Services Department said.

The projects for the reconstruction of all 54 houses should be developed in less than a year — by April 2026.

We asked Deputy Mayor of Mykolaiv Serhii Koreniev, who is in charge of rebuilding the city, who is in charge of this process and how he controls it. In recent years, this is the largest amount ever spent on design work in the city.

According to the vice mayor, it is planned to restore the entire infrastructure of the courtyards in the surrounding area, not just the buildings themselves.

«This is not only for the design of houses, but also for the entire housing infrastructure. Therefore, the amount allocated is impressive. But this does not mean that all of it will be spent, as the procurement procedures will be monitored by the World Bank and the project management team», explained Serhii Koreniev.

Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych, responding to NikVesti, expressed some doubt whether Mykolaiv even has the necessary number of designers to develop so much documentation.

«It's not just some organisations that came out of the basement and decided to work on the project. There will also be additional criteria, because the winners will be selected on the World Bank's site. This is another problem. Because the problem is not just making this project, but even whether there are designers who can do it in time. And this is a big problem for us. We really hope that they understand this,» said Sienkevych.

Risks if reconstruction does not start on time

Once the design and expertise are completed, the reconstruction process should theoretically begin.

But in reality, the question remains whether Mykolaiv will receive funding for the construction and implementation of these projects.

If we take an average figure of 10-15% of the construction cost, then at least 1 billion hryvnias is needed to rebuild fifty high-rise buildings and the area around them.

This raises another important question: will the city have time to find such a sum before the developed project documentation becomes obsolete?

In general, Ukrainian legislation does not explicitly set a specific period for the relevance of any developed project. However, in practice, there is a rule: if the design and estimate documentation has not been implemented within three years of its approval, adjustments must be made before implementation. This provision is contained in the state standard of Ukraine «Rules for Determining the Cost of Construction». This is primarily due to changes in construction prices and possible changes in building codes.

That is, if the mayor's office gives a task to adjust the project, the contractor must check the validity of building codes and update the estimate. And then the project must undergo another expert review.

Deputy Mayor Serhii Koreniev is already saying that there are no plans to rebuild all the houses by 2027.

«This does not mean that everything will be built in 2027. It means that so many man-hours will be provided for, so many man-hours we will expect from our contractors. This is what the HOPE project is all about, and this is what the World Bank is counting on,» said Serhii Koreniev.

What houses are promised to be restored?

In fact, the design will not take place building by building, but in clusters. Each of the 21 clusters includes 2 to 5 multi-storey buildings that have been destroyed.

«This is a lot of houses together in one cluster, it is an improvement with an actual change in the space where people will live,» explained Serhii Koreniev.

We tried to get a list of these houses from the Department of Housing and Communal Services of Mykolaiv City Council and sent a request for information.

In response, officials from the Housing and Utilities Department told us that the list was classified and not subject to publication, without citing any provision of Ukrainian law.

«In order to comply with security requirements, the addresses of the relevant facilities are not subject to public disclosure, in particular on the Internet», the official response reads.

However, the Ministry of Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine, NikVesti, provided a complete list of clusters and buildings in response to the same request.

The editors do not see the need to publish the list with addresses, as it may confuse the residents of these houses and violate their sense of security, so we grouped them by district.

A total of 54 buildings were distributed across the city's districts as follows:

• Central district: 11 clusters comprising 26 buildings;
• Zavodskyi district: 3 clusters with 9 buildings
• Inhul district: 4 clusters comprising 12 buildings;
• Korabelnyi district: 3 clusters comprising 7 buildings.

The issue of allocating 150 million hryvnias for the development of projects to restore 54 houses in Mykolaiv has actually been resolved. It can be said that the city was lucky to be among the five communities included in the «HOPE» project funded by the World Bank. After all, this process could probably take years if funds were allocated from the city budget.

However, the effectiveness of the use of these funds will only be seen after the 54 projects have been developed and it is time to implement them. Will the city be able to find the funds for this scale of restoration by then? For example, the restoration of one residential building in the Korabelnyi district requires more than 13 million hryvnias. And if we are talking about 54 such houses, the amount can reach more than 1 billion hryvnias.

This figure, of course, does not reflect the exact calculation, but at least it gives an idea of the approximate amount of money that needs to be raised before Mykolaiv residents can actually see construction cranes, workers in helmets and concrete mixers in their yards, not just drawings, illustrations, slides and estimates of their «beautiful homes of the future».

Yuliia Boichenko, NikVesti