Housing

Many of the victims of the massacre by Hamas on Oct. 7 were members of the communal (kibbutzim) and cooperative (moshavim) villages located next to the barrier from Gaza. An unexposed fact is that their land and housing rights and thus their household capital – even after several generations - are worse than under feudal landlords. This holds for such village across Israel. Our socio-legal-empirical research seeks to raise the veil from this archaic and unjust public policy which has become entrenched and blind. Without extensive legal and policy rethinking, the survivors returning to the villages after reconstruction will still have to live under a quasi-feudal land regime.

SNI has taken on the challenge to examine the reasons for the increase in housing prices in Israel. Among other things, it was found that investing efforts to curb the high housing prices ignores the implications of the fact that only in Israel, unlike all other OECD countries, most of the land reserves are nationally owned.

The study examined the impact of the IDF bases' relocation to the Negev on strengthening the urban regions in the Be'er Sheva metropolitan area. It was hypothesized that the relocation of military installations would become a major mechanism for strengthening the towns located in the Be'er Sheva metropolitan area, strengthening the Negev's urban sector and thus increasing social integration. The study examined this hypothesis, both qualitatively and quantitatively, based on a broad spectrum of collected data.