Count the OSB boards. On a nine-storey panel apartment building in Kharkiv, nearly every window opening on the blast-facing facades has been boarded over. Some have since been replaced with white PVC frames — those are the lucky ones, the apartments whose owners had the means or the connections to get it done independently. The rest are still waiting. People are living behind those boards. Not in temporary shelters. In their homes.
This is the most visible symptom of a problem that local authorities across Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Mykolaiv will tell you about in any coordination meeting: the common spaces of multi-apartment buildings — stairwells, entrance halls, corridors, roofs, facades — are damaged at a scale that no available budget can address quickly. The requests come in constantly. The resources to respond do not.
Why Common Spaces Are Not Somebody Else's Problem
It is tempting to frame common space repair as a lesser priority — individual apartments need windows, roofs need patching, people need warmth. All of that is true. But common space damage creates a specific, structural barrier that individual apartment repair programmes cannot remove on their own.
Ukrainian legislation governing the eVidnovlennia state compensation programme contains a provision that is not widely understood outside the sector: a damaged apartment in a building where common spaces have not been repaired — or where a decision to repair them from other sources has not been formally recorded — is grounds for refusal of compensation. The individual apartment owner cannot access the state programme to fix their home because the stairwell roof, the entrance doors, or the facade of the building in which their apartment sits has not been addressed.
The Shelter Cluster's own assessment data, drawing on REACH's 2024 Shelter Response Support Assessment, quantifies this with uncomfortable precision: 25% of residents surveyed report barriers to accessing eVidnovlennia specifically because of damaged common spaces in their buildings. One in four. In a country where 22,253 multi-apartment buildings have been damaged or destroyed, this means the common space gap is not a footnote. It is blocking access to state compensation for potentially hundreds of thousands of households.
What Local Authorities Are Saying
In coordination meetings and field visits in Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Mykolaiv oblasts, the conversation with local housing departments follows a consistent pattern. The volume of requests is large and growing. Lists of damaged buildings requiring common space repair have been compiled — in some cases running to hundreds of addresses. The technical needs are documented. Engineers have assessed the priority cases. And then the conversation arrives at the budget question, and the answer is always some version of the same thing: we do not have the resources to do this at the speed the situation requires.
This is not a failure of local governance. It is an arithmetic problem. Ukrainian local authorities are operating under wartime fiscal constraints, with reduced tax bases, increased spending obligations, and reconstruction costs that were not anticipated in any pre-war budget cycle. The housing maintenance funds that existed before 2022 were already chronically underfunded. Against the scale of damage that Kharkiv alone has sustained — over 43,000 buildings damaged according to oblast data — the available municipal resources are not a shortfall. They are an order-of-magnitude gap.
What local authorities can do — and are doing — is prioritise. The buildings with the most residents, the most severe damage, the most urgent safety risks. They can manage the lists. They can coordinate with managing entities. They can provide technical documentation. What they cannot do is write cheques that the municipal budget does not contain.
The Specific Challenge: Buildings, Not Apartments
The architecture of the problem is worth stating clearly because it shapes the architecture of the solution. Individual apartment owners can — and do — repair their own windows, repaint their own walls, fix their own plumbing. Ukrainian law allows this, eVidnovlennia funds it for eligible households, and in practice thousands of families have organised their own repairs independently. This is the individual apartment layer of the response, and it functions, imperfectly but recognisably.
Common spaces are structurally different. A roof belongs to all owners in the building collectively. A stairwell serves every household in a section. An entrance facade faces every resident and the entire street. No single apartment owner has the legal authority, the financial capacity, or the practical ability to repair these elements alone. Common space repair requires collective decision-making — through the building's managing entity, ACAB/OSBB, or housing maintenance office — and collective financing. In a building where residents have been partially displaced, where some apartments are vacant, where ownership documentation may be contested or missing, that collective mechanism is slow, difficult, and sometimes impossible to convene.
This is why humanitarian intervention in common spaces is not a supplement to the individual repair system. It is the precondition that makes the individual repair system accessible. A building where the common spaces have been repaired is a building where residents can live with dignity, where the managing entity can function normally, and where individual households can access eVidnovlennia compensation. A building where common spaces remain damaged is a building where all of that is blocked — no matter how many individual apartment repairs have been completed inside it.
According to Resolution No. 381, damaged common spaces in an apartment building are formal grounds for refusal of eVidnovlennia compensation for individual apartment damage — unless the common space damage has been repaired at the time of application, or a formal decision to repair from other funding sources has been recorded.
This means that a humanitarian common space repair programme is not just a shelter intervention. It is an unblocking mechanism — one that directly enables individual households to access state compensation for their own apartments. The humanitarian investment unlocks the state programme. In many cases, the common space repair costs less than the aggregate eVidnovlennia compensation it enables.
What the Repair Actually Costs
The Shelter Cluster has developed a reference cost framework for common space repairs that is calculated at the household level within a building section — accounting for the fact that a roof repair benefits all residents under it, and a stairwell repair benefits all households in that entrance. This is the right way to think about it: the cost per household, not per building.
These numbers make an important point: common space repair is not expensive on a per-household basis. A ten-storey building with 80 apartments in four sections, at $560 per household for the 6+ floor rate, represents a total repair budget of approximately $44,800 — or less than the cost of ten Category 1 individual household repairs. But it removes the eVidnovlennia block for all 80 families and restores a functional, habitable building to a neighbourhood that may have dozens of similar buildings still waiting.
The Three-Stage Degradation Problem
There is a dimension to this issue that goes beyond the immediate repair backlog. Multi-apartment buildings that remain unrepaired do not stay in the same condition indefinitely. They deteriorate. A broken stairwell window that is not replaced allows rain in. Rain in a stairwell damages the structural concrete over successive winters. Wet concrete in an unheated stairwell is damaged further by freeze-thaw cycles. What was a window replacement job in 2022 has become a stairwell structural repair job by 2026.
The black-and-white photograph at the end of this post is not a worst-case scenario from the active front line. It is a building in Mykolaiv Oblast that passed the tipping point — the moment when enough damage accumulated, enough residents left, and the building crossed from "damaged but inhabited" to "abandoned and deteriorating." Once a building reaches that state, the cost of repair escalates dramatically. Structural elements that were compromised but stable are now failing. Systems that could have been restored are now beyond humanitarian repair scope. The community that once lived there is dispersed, and re-assembling it — even if the building were rebuilt — would require years.
Every unrepaired building is, right now, on a trajectory toward that photograph. The question is only how fast.
What Is Needed — From Humanitarian Actors and From Donors
The Shelter Cluster SOP for Common Space Repairs (January 2025) provides a complete operational framework: how to engage managing entities, how to assess and categorise damage, what works are in and out of scope, what the reference costs are, how to avoid the asbestos risks that affect 75% of Ukrainian roofs, and how to ensure that the intervention actually unblocks eVidnovlennia access for residents. The framework exists. The capacity to implement it exists among Shelter Cluster partners. The demand from local authorities exists in large volumes in Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Mykolaiv.
What does not exist, in adequate volume, is the funding specifically designated for common space repair as a humanitarian activity. It competes for space in shelter budgets with individual household repair programmes that are easier to explain and easier to count — fifty windows replaced, twenty roofs sealed, number of beneficiaries clear. Common space repair looks different on a results framework. The beneficiary is a building section, not a household. The output is an unblocked state compensation mechanism, which does not fit naturally into a humanitarian indicator matrix.
Common space repair has a multiplier effect that most humanitarian shelter activities do not. Every repaired building section restores dignity and habitability for multiple households simultaneously, unblocks state eVidnovlennia compensation for those households, prevents further structural deterioration, and enables the building's managing entity to function normally again.
A dedicated funding line for common space repairs — separate from individual household repair programmes, sized to the documented demand from local authorities in priority cities — would deliver impact at a cost-per-household ratio that compares favourably with almost any other shelter activity in the current portfolio. The ask from Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Mykolaiv is not vague. It is a list of buildings, assessed, documented, and waiting. The bottleneck is not information. It is funding.
The building in the first photograph is still inhabited. The people behind those OSB boards are still there, still waiting, still living their lives in a building that tells the story of everything that has happened to their city since February 2022. They should not have to keep waiting because common space repair did not fit neatly into a programme design that was built for individual households.