Rachelle Alterman is professor (emerita) of urban planning and law at Technion—Israel Institute of Technology and Research Fellow of the Neaman Institute for National Policy Research. She heads the Laboratory on Comparative Planning Law and Property Rights. Alterman is the founding president of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law and Property Rights. Her research interests include comparative planning law and land use regulation, comparative land policy and property rights, housing policy, and implementation of public policy. She is highly published and cited. For her pioneering contribution to the field, she was awarded Honorary Member status by the Association of European Schools of Planning (among only 6 awarded this distinction, and the only non-European), and has been selected as one of 16 global “leaders in planning thought” whose academic autobiographies have recently been published in the book “Encounters in Planning Thought” (Routledge publishers, 2017).
Why are the Property Rights of Israel’s Kibbutzim and Cooperative Villages Still Tantamount to Vassals?
Many of the victims of the massacre by Hamas on Oct. 7 were members of the communal (kibbutzim) and cooperative (moshavim) villages located next to the barrier from Gaza. An unexposed fact is that their land and housing rights and thus their household capital – even after several generations - are worse than under feudal landlords. This holds for such village across Israel. Our socio-legal-empirical research seeks to raise the veil from this archaic and unjust public policy which has become entrenched and blind. Without extensive legal and policy rethinking, the survivors returning to the villages after reconstruction will still have to live under a quasi-feudal land regime.
Israel's Land Policy and Housing Prices Abstract – Summary of Pilot Study
SNI has taken on the challenge to examine the reasons for the increase in housing prices in Israel. Among other things, it was found that investing efforts to curb the high housing prices ignores the implications of the fact that only in Israel, unlike all other OECD countries, most of the land reserves are nationally owned.
The ownership is Public, the benefits are not
05 August, 2015
Public land ownership holds many potential benefits for the public. But a new study found that in Israel, where most of the land is nationally owned, the public does not enjoy most of these benefits, but instead has to bear the disadvantages.
