The carpets appeared so suddenly that the building residents had questions on their origins and necessity.
"Like a miracle – you open the door and there they are! No announcement anywhere that they'll be put there and who will pay, nothing."
"Not bad after all. We had these carpets installed long ago by the street cleaners. People throw them out, old carpets. The person enters from outside, wipes their feet, otherwise they enter and the dirt is carried with them everywhere..."
"In the stairs? Why is it needed? I don't think we need it in our five-storey building. Our staircases are always clean. Every week it is cleaned and washed, but the carpet is in the way."
A carpet, being stomped on by shoes of varying degree of dirtiness, requires care, cleaning and parasite spraying. The residents worry what such extravagance might cost.
"The main thing is that us, residents, don't have to pay for it, because we don't exactly need it."
"If it's free we welcome it, but if it comes with costs, then we must count who will pay and how much."
It turns out that the thousands of carpets messing with residents' heads have come from the Rīga house manager company (RNP). According to RNP, they have now been put in 426 buildings but will soon appear in others. RNP's representative Una Grenevica said:
"This is a good solution, well tried in public areas. In other countries and with other managers, the experience shows that this [..] brings good results."
The company said that this would place financial burden on the residents 'only if the manager bought the carpets.' Currently, they are being rented. If the carpet is cleaned once a week, in a month, the maintenance costs the manager 13 euros.
"It must be understood that the street cleaner's profession has come to the point of being unpopular and outdated. The placement of the carpets is one of the solutions that allows dealing with the issue. We can attract less and less workforce so the carpet is a good solution so that the workforce is smaller, and it is within the management cost, so there is no additional bill for that," said Grenevica.
