With great fanfare, Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kachlon recently announced that 15,000 apartments throughout Israel will be assigned by lottery to eligible families at about $50,000 lower than normal cost.
Except for Beit Shemesh and possibly Nazeret, almost all of the cheap apartments are in non-chareidi towns.
MK Yaakov Asher of UTJ complained that chareidim are being treated like second class citizens.
“In general, I think that the Finance Minister’s work in regard to apartments will succeed and it shows great efforts on his part,” he says. “But I expected to get good news regarding neighborhoods and solutions for the chareidi public as well. In this lottery, except for Beit Shemesh the chareidim have nothing.”
The cheap apartments are made available through Israel’s Mechir Lamishtaken (Resident’s Price) which lowers the prices of apartments by giving public land to contractors for an especially low price instead of having contractors submit bids for the land, which obviously raises its cost considerably.
{Matzav.com Israel News}
