In the wake of the damage caused by the war with Iran last month, Israel has established a national rehabilitation plan to rebuild and renovate buildings affected by the fighting. Last week, the Finance and Housing Ministries announced a plan titled Renovating in Unity intended to allow residents in damaged housing projects to renovate under a collective and supervised framework. But according to the Association of Renovation Contractors, the plan leaves out the very workers whom the government could be uplifting.
“The state launched a national rehabilitation plan—but decided to exclude renovation contractors from it,” Eran Siv, chairman of the association, told Davar.
Early on in the war with Iran, the Association of Renovation Contractors, established a list of 450 certified renovation contractors who were ready to go into the field to rebuild damaged buildings—out of the 6,500 contractors represented by the group. According to Siv, they were met with a cold shoulder from the local authorities.
Under the Renovating in Unity plan, the state and the municipality will assign one execution contractor to each damaged building, who will be responsible for renovating all apartments in the building, all under state oversight and funding. The main advantage of the initiative is freeing residents from any renovation-related bureaucracy. On the other hand, since there is only one contractor, the residents will have to agree to a uniform renovation standard.
The Tel Aviv municipality is expected to launch the initiative as early as this week, and many other municipalities—where renovation is needed for thousands of housing units—have already expressed interest. The entire initiative was designed by the Finance Ministry, the Housing Ministry, local governments, and the Israel Builders Association.
The Association of Renovation Contractors was notably excluded from the decision making process. Siv said that the decision will result in harm to small contractors. “The state made a deal with the big contractors in the market,” he said. “They’ll transfer workers from small contractors to the big companies, and instead of letting us do quality work, they’re giving the jobs to a construction contractor who has no renovation experience, and along the way he’ll make a profit off of us.”
The state has argued that it will be faster and more efficient to use a general contractor for each damaged building rather than allowing each family to work with its own renovation contractor, an argument that Siv dismissed.
“It won’t be fast, and definitely not efficient,” he warned. “Construction contractors are not trained in managing renovations, and the whole plan is based on some preliminary assumption that says because of the situation, homeowners will agree to a lower standard. Why would anyone agree to return to an apartment in worse quality than before the attack? Why give up the ability to design and make changes during the renovation, and most importantly, to be in direct contact with the contractor who is doing the work?”
The correct way to go about it, he said, would be to give a financial grant to each family whose house was damaged. That way “they can choose what to do and with whom,” he said.
In the weeks since the war with Iran, renovations have slowly begun, mostly in buildings with minor damage to windows or doors. “The more complicated things like bathtubs, sinks, toilets, tiling—no one is touching that yet,” Siv said. “I talk to the residents all the time. The uncertainty is enormous. People don’t know what to do. I think in a few months, when people realize what they’re getting in the big renovation, they’ll lose it—and there won’t be anyone left to complain to.”