Almost all citizens of Israel's weaker sectors are not protected and are not included in evacuation-reconstruction plans like residents of the center of the country, because a significant portion of them live in the southern or northern periphery. The refrain is well known: the value of the land is very low and therefore it is not economically feasible for developers to invest in these places. But where is the country?
If you want to understand where the failure begins, you first have to look at the figures for public housing in Israel, which accounts for only 2% of the country's total housing, compared to 12% in Europe.
TakeRachel (not her real name) from Holon, a single mother of four who is waiting for public housing and now lives in a destroyed rented apartment with water leaks. The landlord often threatens to evict her and her children because she doesn't have enough money to pay for rent, and among other things, she has to give up classes and extracurricular activities for the children, and sometimes even food in order to survive.
In the current situation, it has no chance of breaking out of the cycle of poverty because it has to take care of the children, and the queue for public housing in Holon is only growing because no public apartments are being bought or built in the city at all.
"Two of my children are autistic and I've been waiting for public housing for five years," says Rachel, "The war made things worse because my ex-husband lost his job and I don't even get alimony from him anymore. An inspector from the Housing Ministry came here and said that the rented apartment I live in was uninhabitable. I can't buy food or pay for electricity, and I have to spend all my money on renting a destroyed apartment."
Disproportionate expenses
It seems that poverty in Israel is rarely discussed. The plight of the reservists, young couples, the dismissed and the unpaid leave pass better than the screen. Poverty is not photogenic enough and the situation is depressing, so why add? And so it turns out that without much attention, budgets or government programs, they always try to sweep the issue under the carpet.
In recent days, the poverty report of the National Insurance Institute and Latet was published. Year after year, these important reports are published, revealing difficult data, but unfortunately they do not present real solutions and are forgotten quite quickly. The events of October 7 are expected to lead to a significant exacerbation of poverty, and in order for us to deal effectively and focused with the plague of this country in the coming years, there is a real need to isolate its causes and address the root of the problem.
If in the past it was believed that poverty is the exclusive province of the unemployed, today it is clear that work in Israel does not necessarily remove the cycle of poverty. In Israel, the high expenditures are not in line with wages and impair the ability of a large part of working people to live in dignity and welfare, and therefore, instead of distributing charity and alms, the government must deal with these disproportionate expenses.
Housing is certainly one of the main causes of the deterioration into poverty, since it is the largest expenditure of households in Israel. Whether it's renting or paying a mortgage, people who don't own apartments (a mortgage debtor doesn't count as such) are forced to spend too much of their salary on housing. This makes many poor when it comes to other expenses such as food, medicine, education and welfare.
While in the world it is customary to talk about affordable housing, the price of which does not exceed 30% of the average free wage, in Israel housing expenditures among working middle-class families (deciles 7-3) are 35%-60% of wages. Among the three lowest deciles, expenditure is much higher, reaching 60%-70% of free income – leaving many families without resources for basic needs.
Not even halfway
Since the beginning of the war, there has been a deterioration in the situation of those who already have difficulty meeting current payments, and this week the Bank of Israel announced a worrying increase in the number of families who postponed mortgage payments. In addition, more than half a billion shekels were added to the funds in insolvency due to families' inability to meet payments.
In 2016, when the Committee for the War Against Poverty published its conclusions, it showed that housing expenditure is one of the main causes of poverty, and even proposed significantly expanding the share of public housing. The committee examined hundreds of cases, and its conclusions found that 40% of the families who received public housing no longer needed welfare services and emerged from the vicious cycle of multigenerational poverty. The red line in terms of the number of public apartments, according to the committee members, should be 110,000, but unfortunately nothing has been done since then, and today there are fewer than 48,000 public apartments in Israel – not even half of the committee's recommendation.
The committee also recommended a significant increase in rental assistance payments and their linkage to market prices. Unfortunately, this recommendation was also ignored by the government, and therefore tens of thousands of poor families receive rent assistance of NIS 1200,700, which helps apartment owners who raise prices more than the homeless.
In addition, numerous reports by the State Comptroller, the Knesset Research Authority, and various NGOs have been published, indicating that the state's investment in housing assistance in general is very low relative to the rest of the world, and even lower when it comes to needy populations.
A woman with a sign at a demonstration,
Chairman of the Public Housing Forum, Danny Gigi, concludes: "Today, more than ever, with tens of thousands of families displaced from their homes and with cuts in welfare budgets expected, it is important that the public demand a new program that will strengthen the middle class, which is liable to fall into poverty. Such a plan should also include a significant response to the issue of poverty that arises in reports year after year, with the focus on addressing the largest household expenditure in Israel – housing."
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