Gov't engineers Arab housing crisis
Overcrowded Arab town of Jisr al-Zarqa, squeezed between a highway, a number of Jewish towns and the ocean. Photo by Nimrod Glickman
As long as Israel views the Arab minority’s interest as conflicting with the Jewish majority’s interest, Arab citizens’ housing crisis will not be solved.
The High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel declared a general strike on Tuesday, 28 April 2015, to protest against home demolitions by the Israeli government. Businesses and schools in the Palestinian Arab community plan to strike, and plans have been made for protests against this governmental policy.
Today, Adalah is issuing its response to the State Comptroller’s Report on the Housing Crisis, which was released in February 2015. Adalah’s report, written by Adalah Legal Apprentice Mohammed Bassam and Attorney Mysanna Morany, argues that the housing shortage in Arab communities is not the result of the “failures” or “deficiencies” that the Comptroller identifies with respect to the housing crisis in Jewish Israeli communities, but rather is the result of deliberate, consistent, and systematic government policy that places obstacles before Arab citizens. The response details a number of areas in which Israeli state policy directly affects the possibility of development in Arab towns:
Discriminatory policy in the marketing of state lands: Institutionalized discrimination is one of the major impediments blocking the development of Arab towns. For example, in 2014, the Israel Land Authority (ILA) published tenders for construction of 38,261 housing units in Jewish communities (not including mixed-population cities), compared with only 1,844 such tenders issued for housing in Arab communities. In other words, although Palestinian Arab citizens make up approximately 20% of Israel’s population, they have access only to 4.6% of new housing units.
Master Plans: The Comptroller’s report discusses the failures in the implementation of National Master Plan 35 (“TAMA 35”), which was designed to meet the construction needs for Israel as a whole, but ignores the fact that, under this Plan, most Arab communities are marked as areas “for preservation”. This designation limits their development options considerably. Moreover, the Comptroller’s report refers to the need to update district and local master plans. This problem is far more acute in Arab towns: of 139 Arab localities, only 41 have up to date master plans.
Areas of jurisdiction: The areas of jurisdiction of these 139 Arab towns comprise only 2.5% of the territory of the state. Despite natural population growth, the state has not established a single new Arab community since 1948 (outside the Naqab (Negev)), nor has it expanded the existing communities’ jurisdictional areas. This situation has led to an 11-fold increase in the population density of Arab localities and significantly contributed to the housing shortage. But although this data is widely available, the State Comptroller does not address this issue at all in his report.
Problems relating to local authorities: Local authorities play an important role in the planning and development of a town but only five Arab local authorities act as local planning and building committees. Currently, regional committees, made up of several different communities, do most planning for Arab towns. This system prevents Arab communities from having development plans designed to address the unique needs of their residents.
Overcrowded Nazareth, a view of the Arab town that never appears in the tourist brochures. Photo by Reuters.
Government plans for affordable housing overlook Arab localities: The Israeli government is promoting affordable housing programmes while ignoring the needs of Palestinian Arab citizens. For example, under the “Target Price” plan, which began in 2014, 66,000 new housing units will be marketed between 2015 and 2019, at significantly discounted prices. Yet not one Arab locality is included in the 30 communities where this plan will be implemented.
In conclusion, Adalah contends that it is “… barriers resulting from deliberate, consistent, and systematic policy giving preference to the settlement of the Jewish population at the expense of the development of Arab communities [that] stand in the way of the progress of Arab towns and the resolution of their housing shortage. … As long as the State’s policy under which ‘one hand confiscates and destroys and the other hand builds’ persists, and as long as the State views the Arab minority’s interest as conflicting head-on with the interest of the Jewish majority, the State Comptroller’s recommendations will not be able to solve the housing crisis in Arab society in Israel.”
Full report:
Deliberate Obstacles, Not Failures, pdf file
Adalah’s response to the State Comptroller’s Report on the subject of the housing crisis in Israel
April 2015
Tent city on Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, in protest against the price of housing in Israel. Photo by Myriam Darmoni
State Comptroller report: Israeli government to blame for housing crisis
Just weeks before elections, scathing report blames government inefficiency for out of control housing costs
By i24
February 25, 2015
Israel’s State Comptroller Joseph Shapira on Wednesday released a scathing report on the country’s housing crisis, blaming the out of control housing costs on government inadequacies and a stifling bureaucracy.
The report, which comes just weeks before Israel’s election, paints a bleak picture of the country’s housing, revealing that on average the cost of buying an apartment rose by a staggering 55 percent between 2008 and the end of 2013.
During the same period, the average monthly rent also rose by 30 percent, the 294-page report said, adding that “no solution was found” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which took office in 2009, to try to slow the continuing rise.
In 2014, prices increased another five percent, figures published this week showed.
The report comes a week after Shapira officially rebuked Netanyahu over excessive spending on running his private and public residences in a separate report ahead of the March 17 snap vote.
In the face of “soaring house prices,” wages barely increased during the period, the report said.
“The various government departments reacted with no strategic plan of action in the long term, and without any goals set,” it said.
Shapira’s report noted that Israel’s planning bodies were largely to blame for the housing market not keeping up with demand, with the Interior Ministry and Israel Lands Authority singled out for criticism.
“It takes roughly 12 years to go from the submission of a [housing] plan to the planning committees [of the Israel Lands Authority] to the existence of a finished apartment,” the report noted.
“Over the years, planning committees approved tens of thousands of housing units – fewer than the number demanded by the market,” the report said. “The planning inventory was eroded, and lost some 50,000 housing units.”
When the housing crisis first erupted in 2008, then-PM Ehud Olmert “did not have the means to deal with the soaring housing costs and the growing crisis.”
According to Shapira’s findings, it was only in July 2010 that the government, headed by Netanyahu, realized there was a need to “rein in the sharp increase in prices and determined that a policy should be instituted.”
However, the report noted, the government failed to address the crisis and translate ideas into action.
“Government ministries acted without a multi-year strategic plan and without setting policy goals that were coordinated among the bodies involved in [developing] the needed residential infrastructures. These activities were spread among different bodies, and lacked any coordinating body.”
The damning report is an investigation into the housing market up until the end of 2013 and does not include the past 20 months of the Likud government’s term.
On February 17, another report from Shapira detailed how spending on cleaning, food and repairs at Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem and his private home in northern Israel rose dramatically when the premier took office in 2009, but then decreased in 2013.
It also mentioned alleged mishandling of funds from recycled bottles by Netanyahu’s wife Sarah, as well as the purchase of garden furniture for the weekend residence.
Despite the scandal, and center-left opposition lapping up media campaigns against Netanyahu, polls suggest the incumbent premier will nonetheless win a fourth term at the head of a right-wing government led by his Likud party.
Netanyahu reacted coolly to the latest report.
“This report is important and rightly states that there are many things still to do in this domain, which I shall act on if re-elected,” he said while visiting a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.
Israel’s high cost of living and soaring housing prices in 2011 prompted hundreds of thousands of protesters to camp out in commercial capital Tel Aviv in a mass protest that summer.