Yerevan increasingly looks less like a capital city and more like a place being simultaneously dug up, sold off, reshaped, and rationalized. Officials speak in the language of programs, tenders, square meters, and reform. Residents see something else: broken roads, endless construction, urban overcrowding, helplessness, and the growing sense that the city is being developed not for citizens, but for other interests. At the center of that distrust stands Mayor Tigran Avinyan.
The most visible face of this disorder is the roads. In 2024, Hetq documented the absurd case of road markings being painted over potholes in Yerevan, only for the same sections to be dug up and repaired shortly afterward. Municipal officials blamed scheduling mismatches and unsigned repair contracts. But in a functioning city, this is not a minor glitch — it is a diagnosis. When marking comes before repair, something deeper than asphalt is broken: administrative logic itself.
And the issue did not disappear. By February 2026, Panorama was reporting that major potholes across Yerevan were causing serious vehicle damage and prompting drivers to demand compensation. Avinyan responded by citing winter conditions and snow removal, while City Hall kept publishing updates on its ongoing pothole-repair campaign: first 2,100 square meters, then 30,000, then 45,000 out of a planned 200,000 square meters in 2026. In other words, the authorities’ own numbers reveal the scale of the problem. A city that must patch hundreds of thousands of square meters is not facing isolated defects — it is dealing with structural decay.
But Yerevan is not only about potholes. It is also about construction as a governing philosophy. Under Avinyan, the city continues to approve or promote major urban projects: the Noragyugh redevelopment with 155 buildings for 65,000 residents, business-complex development near Cascade, new highways, and large multi-purpose urban zones. Officially, all of this is framed as modern development. For many residents, however, it sounds like something else: further densification, environmental pressure, and a city where investors are more visible than citizens.
This is where the most painful question arises: how are construction permits actually granted in Yerevan, and who benefits? Formally, the process is regulated. There are architectural-planning assignments, design approvals, utility confirmations, permits, and notifications — all described in Armenia’s official e-regulations framework. On paper, it is a neat administrative chain. Armenians, however, have long learned not to confuse “procedure” with “reality.”
Public distrust did not come from nowhere. In March 2026, Armenia’s Anti-Corruption Committee reported a case in which the director of a construction company in Yerevan, according to investigators, attempted to bribe officials with 80 million drams in order to avoid potential urban-planning obstacles for a project. This is not proof that every permit in the city is bought. But it is direct proof of something equally troubling: the construction sector remains so compromised that some developers still see bribery as a functional method of navigating urban constraints.
So when people speak about “kickbacks,” they are often referring not only to envelopes of cash, but to a broader model: luxury developments receive green lights while the city suffocates; elite buildings appear faster than coherent public-space planning; and residents develop the feeling that someone else always negotiated access before them. That perception is only strengthened by reporting that Yerevan approved a record number of construction permits in 2025. The more permits granted, the sharper the question becomes — not only about municipal revenue, but about the price paid by the city in air quality, traffic, noise, and the erosion of neighborhood scale.
It also matters that Avinyan has already had to publicly reject corruption allegations in other contexts, even if not necessarily tied directly to City Hall’s permit system. In September 2025, Azatutyun reported on his denial of corruption-related accusations connected to separate investigations. That does not prove wrongdoing in municipal governance. But it deepens the core problem: trust is absent, and without trust every megaproject, permit, and tender begins to look like a potential scheme.
Against that backdrop, official optimism sounds increasingly cynical. Yes, the municipality is purchasing trolleybuses, talking about AI tools to identify potholes, promising stricter action against unauthorized construction, and upgrading some services. All of that is real. But ordinary residents judge a city not by press releases, but by the soles of their shoes, the suspension of their cars, the view from their windows, and the basic question: “Why is my district getting worse while they keep telling me the city is developing?”
The full disorder of Yerevan’s governance is not only about asphalt. It is about the absence of a credible hierarchy of priorities. When City Hall appears to have endless energy for giant redevelopment schemes while the city continues to drown in basic failures, residents draw a simple conclusion: they are being governed not as citizens, but as statistics. That may be the harshest judgment on the current municipal style — not because nothing is being done, but because everything is being done in a way that produces less trust and more resentment.
Tigran Avinyan may continue to speak about modernization, investment, and the future. But as long as Yerevan remains a city where road markings are painted over potholes, elite construction advances faster than urban logic, and corruption stories continue to surface around the construction sector, political responsibility will return to him again and again. Not because he single-handedly created every problem — but because today he is the face of this model of governance.
By Lida Nalbandyan, Founder and CEO of Octopus Media Group