
The average wait time for public housing in Israel is nearly three years, more than one billion shekels earmarked to purchase new state housing has gone untouched, and one-third of the defects in public housing properties that were identified in 2019 are still not repaired. A law intended to allow residents to purchase their rented to public housing apartments was not renewed, despite dozens of government promises, and the government has failed to come up with a plan to purchase enough housing to meet demand. These are just some of the troubling conclusions that emerged from the Knesset’s public housing day committees earlier this month.
“The state of Israel, for all the grievances of its establishment, enshrined the right to have a roof over one’s head as a basic right, even as a poor nation,” lawmaker Naama Lazimi, who organized the day together with fellow Knesset member Michael Biton, said. “But now that the state of Israel is wealthy, it has annihilated that right.”
Lazimi and Biton sought to bring back to the table the public housing issues that had been pushed to the side during the war, with the first and foremost issue being the lapse of the Sales Law, the law that allows public housing dwellers to purchase their home at a discount. That law lapsed two years ago.
Six months after the law expired, Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf was supposed to renew it, but because of the war and the government and its ministries’ disarray, he did not reintroduce the law. Thousands of residents were therefore precluded from purchasing their homes at an affordable price.
The Adva Center, which has been investigating public housing policy in Israel for years, presented a troubling picture. According to the center, the Housing Ministry spent only 800 million shekels (about $222 million) on public housing in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, a mere 0.03% of the state’s record revenue from real estate taxes that year. A 2.2 billion shekel (about $600 million) budget to purchase new public housing mostly went untouched and is now frozen, since it was given on condition that it be used by the end of 2024.
“Public housing in Israel is looking bad due to a policy of budgetary neglect that sees the residents as leeches who are to blame for their situation,” Yaron Hoffmann-Dishon, a researcher at the Adva Center, said. “Today brought no news — there is no legislative progress in regards to the Sales Law, and the state is sending people to apply for rent assistance that the Ministry of Finance refuses to update.”
On average, rent assistance in 2024 amounted to no more than a quarter of the cost of rent, Hoffman-Dishon found in a study. Although the budget for rent assistance has increased, it is still not large enough to accommodate the sharp increase in rent in recent years.
“The finance minister refuses to update the budget for rent assistance because he does not want to transfer more money to the landlords,” Hoffman-Dishon said. “He knows that this is a failure of a policy—yet he continues even so.”

The reason that the ministries of housing and finance oppose the renewal of the Sales Law is that when public housing apartments are purchased at a discount, the government isn’t left with enough money to buy a replacement apartment. According to the ministries, in order to purchase one new apartment for the public housing pool, five old apartments must be sold, and the ministry prefers that the apartments remain in its possession.
That said, it’s not clear why the government doesn’t promote construction on state lands, a move which would, in part, bypass these market forces. That’s a question that was raised by lawmakers Biton and Lazimi.
The Israel Land Authority has said that it would support, together with the Housing Ministry, any decision that would allow construction and purchase on state land, including purchases within discounted housing plans, but this would require legislation. The Ministry of Finance refused the move, citing legal claims and concerns about violating contractors’ rights.
Biton said that he himself grew up in public housing in the 1970s. “Unfortunately, what was hard then has become unbearable today,” he said.
He called for the continuation of legal proceedings against the Ministry of Housing and Amidar, the state-owned housing company, for not promoting an increase in public housing stock despite promises to do so.
“We are a country that is abandoning its most vulnerable populations, giving up on the basic values of social justice and collective responsibility,” he said.
This article was translated from Hebrew by Tzivia Gross.