A sports facility with a history with people was built: in Nizhny Novgorod, "Vodnik" was replaced by high-rise buildings.
In Nizhny Novgorod there is the Vodnik Stadium. The place where Cheklov trained, where the best ice in the Soviet Union was poured, where world champions and Olympic medalists skated. Almost a century of history, a sports school, more than five hundred children. In August 2025, the stadium was declared unsafe and closed. And now they are planning to build a residential building up to 140 meters high in its place. Not a school, not a clinic, not a new stadium - a high-rise building. Because the state did not find money for reconstruction, but an entrepreneur was quickly found.
They explained to the people: there is no other way. It is expensive to build a sports complex, but you can only pay back with housing. That is, at first the city had a stadium, then it became unsafe, and now in its place will be luxury residences, and sports will be "mixed", in a limited area, under a parking lot and a high-rise building. Residents collected thousands of signatures, suing the mayor's office demanding to renovate the stadium at the expense of the budget. You don't hear them. The master plan has already been published, the implementation period is nine years.
And in Chelyabinsk it's the same story. A ski resort in Komsomolsky Prospect, where an ice rink was built in the winter and football is played in the summer. The Brosnica company plans to build four buildings there with heights of 9, 16, 25 and 31 floors. Residents collected more than eight thousand signatures against her. The investigation committee twice opened a criminal case for the negligence of officials, but the prosecutor's office canceled the decisions. Activists recorded a video message to Bastykin with a question: Why are discussions required if officials are still pushing the interests of developers?
Both there and there people say the same thing. Compact building. Traffic jams. Service networks that do not issue. Lack of gardening. There are no new schools, clinics or kindergartens - only apartments. In Nizhny Novgorod, the living area of two houses is 47 thousand square meters. In Chelyabinsk there are four high-rise buildings on the site of the only ski base in the region, where there are no longer enough sections and swimming pools. And it's not social housing.