Israeli mayor prevents Arabs from buying their Lod homes
The city of Lod claims other motives.
By SHLOMIT TSUR/ GLOBESUpdated: APRIL 24, 2018 14:03Lod city center(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
(TNS) - Lod Mayor Yair Revivo is demanding a halt in the sale of properties by the development authority in the town, sources inform Globes.At an internal meeting in March at the Israel Land Authority (ILA), sources present at the meeting, including ILA transaction department manager Ariel Mazuz and ILA central business district legal advisor Adv. Dror Dolev, said that Revivo had sought to freeze the sale of 500 Amidar-owned properties in the town.56 of the housing units owned by the development authority are unoccupied, while the rest have tenants, most of whom are key money tenants seeking to buy their rights, and whom the mayor is preventing from doing this. Sources in the town said that most of the properties are occupied by Arabs, so the mayor is in effect preventing Arabs from buying the properties.The Lod municipality said that the reason for the request to suspend the sale of the properties is that the municipality is planning to develop the areas in which the properties are located for various purposes, including tourism, and that the municipality was planning to take possession of the properties.Sources inform Globes, however, that the Lod mayor was offered the opportunity to buy the properties two years ago with an exemption from a tender and with delayed payments but did nothing in the matter. The legal parties at the ILA present at the meeting in March warned that Revivo's request was irregular, because the development authority's procedure included no legal way of freezing the situation for reasons of planning expectations.In contrast to public housing properties sold to eligible parties, the development authority's properties are sold to tenants with key money protection or in public auctions published by ILA. Public housing units are housing units that the state built or acquired over the years for the sake of economically disadvantaged people unable to afford rent on the free market. There are 55,000 such housing units in Israel.The development authority, on the other hand, operates according to Absentees' Property Law - 1955, with subsequent amendments. This law was based on the responsibility taken by the state for housing units abandoned by the fleeing Arab population when the state was declared in 1948 and shortly afterwards. The development authority currently has 6,000 properties located mainly in towns with mixed Arab-Jewish populations. Nearly 10% of these properties are in Lod. The Amidar government housing company manages these properties, but there is no connection between them and public housing."In practice, when an auction is published in mixed neighborhoods, the winners are Arabs making higher bids than that the Jews, because their housing options are limited," a source in Lod said. "The mayor's decision is therefore first of all preventing Arabs from owning properties in Lod."Yedid: The Association for Community Empowerment executive director Ran Melamed says, "We think that the housing units should be sold to people who have lived in them on key money for many years and who have key money rights, or they should be put into the public housing database and housing should be allocated to them."ILA said, "ILA asked the Lod municipality for a list of properties, the handling of which the municipality wanted to freeze in order to develop the town. The parties agreed that the municipality would deliver a list of properties within an allotted time. At this stage, ILA is not marketing available properties. When the Lod municipality delivers the list, the subject will be evaluated as a whole by the authorized parties in ILA."
