Kahlon and Galant have decided that 7% of the land owned by the state will be allocated for social housing.
The decision will soon be submitted to the for approval, but it is not final and may vary from 5% to 10%. The goal is to add 70,000 social housing units in the next decade.
This means that in all cases where a contractor purchases land for construction from the Israel Land Authority (ILA), they will have to allocate a portion of the apartments built to the Ministry of Housing in order to house families entitled to social housing.
It is worth noting that a similar proposal is included in the recommendations made by the interministerial committee established by Galant to increase the supply of social housing, led by its director general Haggai Reznik.
The idea of allocating part of the state land for social housing is not new. About two years ago, Kahlon and Galant announced that up to 5% of the apartments would be designated for social housing. However, to date, this policy has hardly been implemented. As far as is known, only one tender in Beer Yaakov allocated a few percent of the apartments for this purpose.
We are now following the ongoing process being developed by Kahlon and Galant. The allocation of apartments for social housing will cease to be optional.
The Ministry of Housing has been trying to promote housing allocations for several months and is part of the “living with dignity” plan, which aims to add 70,000 apartments designated for social housing within 10 years. Until now, it was unclear whether Kahlon would support the plan, due to the cold relations between him and the Minister of Housing, Galant.
Galant established the interministerial committee in the context of the severe shortage of social housing. Today, in Israel, about 30,000 households are entitled to social housing, for which the state has no apartment available for them. About 4,000 of them are entitled to the Ministry of Housing and the others to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.
This shortage is partly the result of the large-scale sale of apartments by the state over the past 20 years, during which tens of thousands of apartments have been sold without replenishing the stock. Over the past three years, the Ministry of Housing has repurchased nearly 2,000 apartments. Today, the “living with dignity” plan aims to increase the supply by several tens of thousands of apartments.
