The Affordable Housing Crisis: Good Solutions, Bad Solutions

The Tel Aviv tent protest. Photo by Activestills

Last Thursday, dozens of people pitched their tents at a central square in Tel Aviv, in protest of the soaring housing prices; hundreds of others quickly followed, pitching tents in other parts of Israel.
 
This justified protest comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following updates from ACRI. In recent years, Israeli housing policies have changed beyond recognition, with the dominant trends being privatization and the shirking of responsibility: reduced assistance to apartment buyers, privatization of the mortgage market, cutbacks in rental assistance for disadvantaged populations, and the elimination of public housing.
 

 
In the past year, ACRI has been working to promote a reform to the Planning and Building Law, which has been in place almost since the founding of the State of Israel. ACRI and other members of the Coalition for Affordable Housing in Israel are advancing amendments that focus on social and economic rights, including equal representation in planning committees, public participation, transparency, and the inclusion of representatives of social rights organizations in planning committees.
 
However, the government – instead of promoting affordable housing by setting rules, demands, and incentives that will encourage contractors to build public housing and affordable housing – is currently promoting a media spin: the National Housing Committees (NHCs) Bill. This government sponsored bill, which was approved for its second-third reading yesterday (19 July 2011), aims to establish, for a temporary period of time, National Housing Committees for large-scale housing plans, while bypassing regular planning procedures.
 
The government claims that establishing NHCs will minimize bureaucracy and will increase the supply of apartments in Israel, thereby helping in solving the current housing crisis. According to ACRI, Bimkom – Planners for Planning rights, and the Association for Distributive Justice, establishing NHCs as a solution for the housing crisis will bypass planning procedures and will lead to flawed housing plans, which will not provide a minimal quality of life for the residents; this, while also severely harming the environment and infringing on the public’s right to voice opinions regarding housing plans. According to the organizations, the State must indeed examine solutions to shorten the waiting period for the approval of housing plans in Israel, but this must be done while maintaining planning considerations, a high professional standard, and public participation.
 
The current version of the bill, which was approved yesterday, includes only minor changes that do not address these issues. It does not include any minimal requirements for building affordable housing or public housing of any kind, not even public housing for disabled persons, and does not equip the authorities with any budgetary or administrative tools to encourage these kinds of housing development. The members of the Knesset committee that discussed this bill further rejected suggestions to appoint a social adviser to the NHCs, or to include in them a representative of the Ministry of Welfare or a representative of handicapped persons’ organizations.
 
According to Attorney Gil Gan-Mor, Coordinator of ACRI’s Right to Housing Project, “This is not the way to prepare legislation that will promote affordable housing. The bill that was approved by the committee is no more than a media spin that will not hold water. Members of Knesset, who will vote on this law in the plenum next week, must understand that in the current version the National Housing Committees will do more harm than good. The NHCs will not promote affordable housing, certainly not in the numbers that are needed today. Instead, we will continue to see the large land reserves in the center of Israel turning into sky-scraper neighborhoods for wealthy residents only.”
 

Pitching a protest tent in Tel Aviv. Photo by Eyal Warshavsky