The municipal opposition, demanding decent public transportation, goes on the offensive.

Tel Aviv’s opposition party Ir Likulanu (City for All) launched a well-organized assault on Mayor Ron Huldai’s transportation policies, or lack thereof, last night during a meeting of the city council. Huldai, however, came prepared, armed with a well-timed newspaper headline and a motion designed to preempt the opposition’s initiative.

The meeting began with a sharp and impassioned speech by Dr. Noah Efron of Ir Likulanu, who called on the mayor to create a high-level task force charged with identifying concrete and immediate solutions to the city’s transportation problems within 6 months. Efron stressed that he was not calling specifically for implementation of the bus rapid transit (BRT) plan for which his party has been campaigning for several months, but for any solution with the potential to solve the city’s traffic problems in the near future. During his speech, Efron handed Huldai a document containing what he said were signatures of thousands of city residents who support such a system.

The speech drew several rounds of applause from an unusually large audience, many of whom were Ir Likulanu supporters.

Following Efron’s speech, Huldai took the podium. “It’s a shame that your speech is based on ignorance and demagoguery,” he began. “You say something needs to be done – why don’t you do something? You say it can be done – why don’t you do it? Don’t lecture me if you don’t know the facts.”

At this point, Huldai’s sarcasm began to draw boos and heckling from the audience. With a nod from the mayor, security guards escorted several of the loudest hecklers out of the hall. Not surprisingly, the mayor suggested that the council remove Efron’s motion from the agenda, which it did. Then Huldai picked up Efron’s petition, and handed it right back to him.

With the opposition’s challenge out of the way, it was time for Huldai to drop his bomb, which was delivered by Deputy Mayor Meital Lehavi (Meretz). (Earlier, with the procedural pettiness typical of city council meetings, Huldai’s coalition had attempted to have Lehavi speak before Efron, a move calculated to preempt his motion. Ir Likulanu protested, however, and Efron was allowed to speak first.)

The big announcement: according to Lehavi, a metropolitan transit authority would be set up in “early 2011.”

The authority, she said, would be given the power to plan, administer and supervise public transportation in the metropolis, and had already been agreed to in principle by the Finance and Transportation Ministries. The authority would be staffed by representatives of local authorities and the national government. Accordingly, Huldai had arranged a meeting of the metropolis’ 20 mayors next month to discuss the plan.

Although not stated explicitly, it appeared that Huldai was positioning himself to lead the future authority.

Lehavi also proposed the creation of a “lobby” which would advocate for the decentralization of legal powers governing transportation planning from the central government to local authorities, which she invited Efron to join.

The announcement reflected a long-standing demand from Huldai, who has repeatedly claimed that city mayors in Israel do not have the legal power to design transportation systems for their cities. By law, those powers are held by the Transportation Ministry. However, this has not stopped Israel’s other two major cities, Haifa and Jerusalem, from moving forward on their respective mass transit systems, both of which are now nearing completion of their initial phases, while Tel Aviv’s remains stuck.

The reason for this apparently has to do with the respective characters of those cities’ mayors. In the current reality, progress depends on tight coordination between the municipality and the Transportation Ministry, something which Haifa and Jerusalem have evidently achieved, while Huldai’s relationship with the Ministry and its officials has been adversarial and characterized by mutual recriminations.

The move to set up a metropolitan transit authority, which had already been unveiled in that morning’s newspaper, was widely seen as positive. Yet the timing of the move, after a full 12 years of Huldai’s administration doing little or nothing to break through the deadlock, was seen by some city councilors as outrageous.

Ir Likulanu’s Yoav Goldring attacked the mayor for his “lack of vision,” claiming that the sudden progress was only achieved due to the political pressure created by his party’s grassroots BRT campaign. The move, he said, proved that pressure from citizens can spur politicians to action.

Latet Lichyot (Let Live) councilor Reuven Ladianski, a member of Huldai’s governing coalition, protested that “Tel Aviv’s transportation system is a catastrophe, everything is stuck. It’s a resounding failure that belongs first of all to you, Mr. Huldai.” He went on to suggest that the mayor put the issue at the top of his agenda, and devote all of his efforts to finding immediate solutions.

Huldai, however, seemed unfazed by the scathing criticism, and even visibly amused by it. “We will continue to make Tel Aviv an exemplary city,” he proclaimed from the council podium, through his own muted laughter, “which everyone wants to live in – including the members of Ir Likulanu.”

To which one spectator retorted: “Despite you, not because of you.”

With expectations for Cancun talks low, mayors demand a seat at the table.

Pedestrians waiting to cross a street in Mexico City.

As the consequences of global climate change increasingly make themselves felt, they will disproportionately affect the world’s cities. Yet ongoing attempts to reach a global climate agreement have thus far excluded mayors and city governments, according to a panel of mayors from Latin America, Europe and Africa.

The mayors, who spoke this morning at the UCLG world congress in Mexico City, said climate talks have been dominated by national governments, which they described as part of an “outdated international order, based on political arrangements from the previous century.”

“Many of the problems affecting cities at the local level are caused at the global level,” said Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard. Yet, he said, cities bear the burden of responding to them, and are expected to provide solutions with insufficient budgets and limited help from central governments.

Ingrid Srinath of the World Alliance for Citizen Participation added that cities’ fiscal, technological and infrastructural deficits reflect a less visible deficit of democracy. She argued that the voice of local governments, along with civil society, needs to be reinstated at global forums such as the IMF, the G20 and COP 16, where, she said, these actors currently find themselves completely marginalized. “We need to build networks of local governments and civil society to amplify our voice in these key forums,” she said.

Quito Mayor Augosto Barrera agreed that cities need to increase cooperation, calling it “crazy” that cities too often find themselves in competition with one another. “We must come to an agreement not to compete with each other over who has the lowest taxes,” he said.

Mexico City Mayor Ebrard suggested that the world’s mayors take matters into their own hands by drawing up local action plans and demanding to be involved in global climate talks. “We need a pact to reduce cities’ emissions,” he said, adding, “but we must go beyond that to demand that national governments provide us with the resources to fix the problems created by climate change. Access to [financial] resources and technology are key.”

Ebrard suggested that the mayors prepare their own proposal and present it officially in Cancun. “I’m not just talking about going to meetings and giving speeches,” he said, “but demanding that we be given a seat at the roundtable. We must demand that $30 billion pledged last year at Copenhagen be given to cities for emissions reduction and adaptation to climate change.”

The suggestion was not just rhetorical. On Sunday, the mayors will sign the Mexico City Pact, which will record and monitor cities’ commitments on climate change, and could serve as the basis for the mayors’ entrance into global climate discussions.

This series of posts from Mexico City is being sponsored by Siemens.

Yes, it was a total disappointment. But the very existence of COP15 has already changed the rules of the game.

Environmentalists marching for clean air in Tel Aviv in 2008.

Last month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen, which inspired so much expectation, seems to have pleased no one. Asked to describe their feelings post-Copenhagen in one word, TreeHugger readers responded with words like “disappointed,” “cop-out” and “fail.” Many people have described COP15 as a resounding failure, and maybe it was – but maybe not.

The environmental movement’s struggle is an incremental one. Activists around the world fight local battles within a common, global context. You win some and you lose some, but you’re always working within certain limitations: the public’s awareness of the issues, the receptiveness (or lack of it) of politicians, the limits of the possible as defined by national laws.

Then, every few years, something comes along and changes the rules of the game.

In the country where I live, the last time this happened was when Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth came out several years ago. The film was screened extensively around the country, providing Israelis with a clear and coherent explanation of an issue that many had previously considered esoteric and controversial. Its effect was surprising and profound, and it changed the way Israeli society thought about climate change.

Something similar has happened with Copenhagen. As the summit approached, more and more politicians seemed to be getting the message. Just before the summit, a group of lawmakers proposed a package of four green bills. Two are moving forward.

In Copenhagen, Israel’s President announced the country’s commitment to reduce its carbon emissions by 20% by 2020. The Ministry of the Environment is already working on practical ways to make this happen. And COP15 may have tipped the scales against a new coal-fired power plant, a battle that environmentalists have been stubbornly waging for years.

Failure or not, Copenhagen has already changed the rules of the game in Israel, and I’m convinced similar things are happening in other places as well. For example in Brazil, where a new post-Copenhagen law calls for a 39% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. We can expect to hear about a lot more of these commitments in the wake of the summit.

The reason is that the world’s governments now realize that they will be required to cut their countries’ emissions at some point in the future. Even if it didn’t happen in Copenhagen, it probably will in Mexico City, or after. It may take time, but now it’s clear to everyone that it will happen, eventually.

And, broadly speaking, the outlines of a future agreement are there in the Copenhagen Accord. Although undoubtedly a disappointment, this document is still an enormous precedent. It will be hard to backtrack on its principles – the only way to move will be forward, especially as countries that were excluded from the discussion this time make their voices heard in the next round.

For the environmental movement, Copenhagen marked a sort of coming of age. It has emerged as a major player in the dynamics of climate politics, and no one can ignore its influence any longer. The challenge now will be to refocus its energies on taking what has already been agreed upon in principle in Copenhagen and leveraging that into a real, binding agreement that truly addresses the problem of global climate change.

That may still be a long way off, but I, for one, am optimistic.

Originally posted at TreeHugger.com on January 3, 2010. Photo by Jesse Fox.

Regardless of whether Dubai manages to get back on its feet or not, the freewheeling development model that it pioneered has effectively been rendered obsolete.

“The World” with Dubai’s skyline in the background. So far, only the project’s model island has been developed. (photo via Time)

It’s hard to believe that anyone was really that shocked last month when Dubai’s real estate bonanza finally collapsed. For those who could see beyond the glitz, the writing had been on the wall for quite some time. Even on a short visit to the emirate almost a year ago, it was already obvious that Dubai’s development model was built upon unstable and partially hollow foundations.

Don’t get me wrong – I really liked Dubai. Compared to its conservative neighbor Abu Dhabi, where beer is only sold in hotel bars, Dubai felt like one big party.

The place was overflowing with energy: a forest of cranes looming over hulking construction sites, swanky clubs and bars buzzing with well-dressed, well-paid expats letting loose. A cosmopolitan atmosphere in which people from all over the world interacted freely with one another, as if such a Babel of overlapping languages and cultures were the most natural thing in the world.

In a very short time, I managed to see many of Dubai’s icons: the indoor ski slope, the palm islands, the fancy hotels. Flying out of the emirate, I saw two more images that lodged themselves in my memory: “The World,” an unfinished, multi-billion dollar man-made archipelago, reportedly already sinking back into the sea, and the older, less glamorous other part of town, where Dubai’s imported (and exploited) underclass lives.

Perhaps the world needs places like this, I thought to myself as Dubai’s skyline receded from view, places with that “last frontier” feel about them, where people feel comfortable taking enormous risks in search of seemingly boundless opportunity.

Dubai was founded on a ‘live for today, to hell with tomorrow’ attitude. That was the idea all along: strive for maximum growth, reap its many benefits, and worry about the ill effects of the endless growth machine later. As long as it managed to thrive and prosper, Dubai’s success became a model that many sought to emulate, and Dubai became a successful brand.

However, last month when Dubai World announced that it would have to hold off on paying back almost $60 billion in debts, the whole Dubai mirage came to a screeching halt. In the end, it was Dubai World’s real estate investments, the very same sector that brought all the glitter and flash to the emirate’s image, that sank the ship.

The media, for its part, focused mainly on how Dubai’s “collapse” would affect the already battered world economy. The answer: apparently not significantly.

But there’s another important lesson to be learned from Dubai’s rapid rise and fall. Turns out, there really are no free lunches in this world – you can feast only for so long until you finally have to pay the bill.

Detail from Blue Crystal’s website.

In Dubai, no project was too ambitious, or too ridiculous. Like the plan for a luxury hotel with a refrigerated beach or the building with 57 private swimming pools. Or the“Blue Crystal,” a man-made floating iceberg containing a variety of entertainment facilities. Just how such a super-sized igloo would make it through the scorching Gulf summer was not clear.

Even as these projects were being promoted, luxury cars were turning up orphaned at the airport as expat owners fled onerous debts, buildings continued to go up although the global financial crisis made it unlikely that they would ever find buyers and raw sewage filled the sea – the very same sea that brought in all the tourists.

Like Enron, Bear Stearns and Lehman, Dubai chose an unsustainable path. Socially, ecologically and economically, Dubai was and is the very antithesis of a sustainable city, and thus its eventual collapse was inevitable.

Those elsewhere who sought to build their own little slice of Dubai (and there were many copycats) would be wise to reassess their plans. No rational businessman should expect to succeed where Dubai’s businessmen-rulers tried and failed.

Whether Dubai manages to land on its feet at the end of all this or not, the freewheeling development model that it pioneered has effectively been rendered obsolete. And that, perhaps more than anything else, may end up being the most significant lasting effect of the current crisis.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on December 13, 2009.

In an article entitled Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com takes a critical look at the popular Transition Towns movement, which attempts to prepare communities for the challenges they face due to peak oil and climate change.

But what I found fascinating, and indeed inspiring, about his piece were his thoughts on transforming local politics.

What Steffen proposes is a new way of looking at civic engagement, minus the standard cynicism and defeatism. “Cynicism is obedience,” he writes, while public processes are too often crafted to sap the will of the public to engage. Such processes, he says, which attempt to deter citizen participation with the promise of boredom, should be viewed with “deep distrust.”

Below, excerpts from Steffen’s piece. Well worth reading:

What can any of us do in the face of planetary catastrophe?

Staring into the ecological abyss, it’s easy to feel small and unimportant. Edward Abbey wrote truly, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” But it’s often hard to see how any actions we might actually take, as individuals, will have any meaningful effect, whatsoever: leaving aside the pablum about small steps and each doing our part, we all know in our hearts that taking out the recycling will not do much to slow the melting of Greenland…

What we need is a movement of local efforts aimed at changing things that matter at scales that matter, based on the politics of optimism. The first step in those efforts is to stop seeing the systems we depend on as out of our control. They aren’t, and that we’re so convinced they are is a testament to the dedication of the powers that be to shoo us away from interfering in their profits.

Cynicism, boredom and fear are their tools. They reinforce, at every opportunity, the idea that government is broken, that civic engagement is for dupes, that real rebellion involves shutting up, making money and spending it. They craft public process to sap the will of the public to engage: as Richard White writes, bureaucracies use boredom the way a skunk uses smell. They make an effort to keep us in a state of constant economic and social anxiety undermining our willingness to connect with and trust each other. Whether these tools are used consciously or unconsciously is completely beside the point — you can apply whatever degree or lack of conspiracy theory you like: the effects are observable, and well-documented.

The great secret here is that we are more powerful than any of us usually admits. While it is true that organized greed beats unorganized democracy every time, it’s also true that organized, educated, passionate democracy is the most powerful political force ever seen, and we live amidst an exploding proliferation of tools for organizing our communities, sharing our knowledge and connecting our passions.

What is more, we live in a time where transparency and collaborative insight give ad hoc groups the capacity to understand the vast, complex systems we depend on, but which the powers that be have cloaked in layers of exclusionary expertise, regulation and jargon. We are not only capable of understanding the systems around us, but of imagining and inventing their replacements, and mobilizing the constituency to make that happen…

What would it take to design a movement that actually changed what needs to be changed? How can we design a networked movement that aims to forestall and undo catastrophe, by building bright green regions and sharing innovation?

Here are a few of the larger design challenges involved:

• Finding places where a system has been draped in complexity, and revealing it in clear, beautiful, interesting ways. How things work is of inherent interest to many people. How can we reveal the workings of the systems around them in ways that help them see the usefulness of change?

• Making public life exciting where boredom has dampened people’s enthusiasm, if not simply driven them completely out of civic involvement. How can we simultaneously reject needless process in favor of quick, transparent and measured decisions and enliven participation? Being part of democracy ought to feel exciting, and invigorating: we should view every part of it that’s boring with deep mistrust.

• Launching a counter-attack on pervasive cynicism and finding fresh ways to call it what it is: cynicism is obedience. The very origins of the word mean “like a dog.” Stripping cynicism of its rebelliousness, making it looks as entirely whipped an attitude as it is, is a huge step towards reclaiming the public realm. Indeed, I think we need to deploy our full battery of humorists, satirists and artists on looking at what part of us makes us so ready to accept the idea that all is sham and we’re beaten before we start.

• Reaching out to people have been made afraid of participation, and spreading enthusiasm and a delight in civic life. How can we make civic participation more welcoming, and jam the manufactured reactionary anger that conservatives use to gum up our public processes (through tea-bagging and astroturfing)?

• Reclaiming the media sphere by supporting local journalism that actually reveals, informs and educates. How can we develop means to support reporting, writing, filmmaking and public discussion that advances our understanding of what to do, leaving behind the tired debates of the last generation?

• Reinventing or replacing the kinds of civic institutions — the university departments, think tanks, research labs, planning agencies — that democracies need to make informed decisions, in the wake of 40 years of work by the right wing to either destroy these institutions or overwhelm them with new, better-funded ideologically-conservative versions.

• Diffusing innovation through our local businesses and industry groups. Unsustainable business is bad business, even in the fairly short run: sound economic strategy in times like ours is to get in the business of replacing the broken systems around us. How do we build local business cultures that support transformation as the opportunity it is?

• Above all else, reimagining the future. Since we can’t build what we can’t imagine, and visions of the future dominate our ability to understand the present, how can we embrace future-making tools to redefine the possible in our communities? Because the powers that be have one gigantic weakness: they offer us no future, none at all, and every time we shift the debate to be about where we’re going, we win.

We don’t yet know how to do all this, but we can iterate our way into it through experimentation, exploration and innovation, consciously practicing ally etiquette to link efforts across a spectrum of systems into a collaborative whole. Indeed, since the whole thing starts with vision, simply sharing our visions for what this looks like is a huge step in the right direction.

We don’t need to wait for some mythical cultural awakening, either. There are more than enough of us, already. In most cities around the world, a fraction of one percent of the citizens getting energized and turning out — using new tools to learn together, coordinate strategy and exert public pressure — would feel like a tsunami of democracy and creative engagement.

And hidden allies can be found everywhere. Public life is full of people who want to see change, but need political cover. Change agents await activation in our government agencies, businesses, schools, political parties and media. If we can begin to engage the systems in which they’ve been quietly laboring at the systems level, we can expect unseen helpers in unexpected places.

It’s time to make ourselves into the people who can do what’s needed. To fight the powers that be, we need to see ourselves as the powers that will be, building the future we want.

Scenes from a new film on post-Katrina New Orleans, which chronicles the city’s troubled attempts to deal with its destruction, while planning its reconstruction.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina dealt the city of New Orleans a near-fatal blow from which it has yet to recover. With entire neighborhoods underwater, communities suddenly finding themselves in exile and city services and infrastructure in disarray, the prospects for reconstruction looked bleak. Hundreds lost their lives in the disaster, while economic damaged was estimated to be over $100 billion.

Over four years later, a battle still rages in New Orleans over where, what and how to rebuild.

Producer and director Luisa Dantas has been following the reconstruction process on the ground in New Orleans since 2006. Working alongside local social justice and grassroots organizations, Dantas has pieced together a narrative about post-Katrina reality called “Land of Opportunity.”

From the website: “A feature-length film and multi-platform project, LAND OF OPPORTUNITY follows a diverse group of people in the early years of post-catastrophe New Orleans as they struggle with the most American of pursuits: seizing opportunity in the wake of tragedy. We get to know local and displaced residents, urban planners, immigrant laborers, and activists, as they try to build a better future for themselves and their families while restoring the “water-proof soul” of America.”

Land of Opportunity is scheduled to be released in 2010.

Check out the trailer:

More clips:

Sectioned Off from JoLu on Vimeo.

Out of Site from JoLu on Vimeo.

Deep Sixed from JoLu on Vimeo.

St. Joe (experimental short) from JoLu on Vimeo.

Tel Aviv’s affordable housing plan remains on paper, while rents continue to rise.

In August of 2008, the Tel Aviv Municipality announced with much fanfare that it had a “revolutionary plan” to build hundreds of affordable apartments for young people in the city.

One year and a global financial crisis later, apartment prices in the city continue their inexorable climb. Mayor Ron Huldai, who announced the plan just months before the local election, was re-elected, and the plan to build affordable housing vanished from the headlines.

Meanwhile young people, faced with rent hikes at the end of their leases, have increasingly decided to move out of the city center. Those who stubbornly insist on staying put have crowded into smaller, more dilapidated apartments. Others have come up with creative ways to save money, like converting their living rooms into an extra bedroom.

What happened to Tel Aviv’s revolutionary plan?

*****

One thing, at least, is clear: work on the plan is done. Earlier this year, in May, the municipality announced that the Municipal Commission for Affordable Housing, the panel of experts that put together the plan, had completed its work.

The commission, composed of external consultants from various disciplines alongside municipal officials, had come up with a list of recommendations that sketched out approximately what an affordable housing program in Tel Aviv would look like. Now it was up to the political echelon to decide what to do with those recommendations, which aspects to approve and how to proceed with the initiative.

To date, the commission’s work is still awaiting approval. Despite the city’s promise back in May that the plan would be presented to the mayor and deputy mayors “in the coming weeks,” that has yet to happen. The commission’s full report, which contains details on the various policy tools under discussion, has not been released to the public.

Dr. Emily Silverman, a researcher from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies, headed the team of professional advisors to the Municipal Commission for Affordable Housing.

“Our main recommendation was that new residential projects built in the center and north of the city include affordable units for rent,” she says. “In exchange for these units, developers would be given extra building rights.”

Silverman continues: “Another recommendation was to push forward building plans in the south of the city and in Jaffa which have already been approved, but have yet to be built due to various regulatory obstacles. Pushing forward those plans would significantly increase the supply of housing.” Indeed, according to press releases put out by the municipality last August, two such projects, slated to contain some 1,650 new apartments, were to be pushed forward immediately.

In addition, a range of other policy tools were proposed, and the commission even suggested specific plots of land for pilot projects.

As to why the commission’s recommendations have yet to be approved, Silverman blames the delay on opposition to the plan among senior figures in the municipality.

The municipality, for its part, appears to be keeping its cards close to its chest for the moment. In response to an inquiry regarding the delay in approving the plan, the Tel Aviv Municipality told Metro:  “The subject of affordable housing is a strategic issue of great significance. Therefore it is important that the approach be allowed to mature in order to reach an operative state. The same goes for the full publication [of the commission’s recommendations].”

*****

The concept of affordable housing is not really new in Israel. From the early days of the state, government policy aimed to make decent, affordable housing accessible to the majority of the population. The Housing Ministry, which wielded tremendous power and influence, once built entire cities from scratch and provided housing for millions of new immigrants.

Over the years, however, as Israel’s centralized, socialist economy gave way to a privatized, capitalist one, the state effectively withdrew from the housing market and the Housing Ministry lost much of its power and resources. The government ceased building public housing apartments for low-income populations, and instead began selling off publicly-owned apartments. In cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where changes in the rental market threatened to make housing out of reach even for middle-income people, pressure began to grow for local governments to intervene.

Israeli municipalities, however, strapped for cash and constrained by antiquated legal structures (the law setting out the powers of local authorities in Israel is a leftover from the British Mandate), were hardly in a position to respond. The demand for a new sort of affordable urban housing grew out of this situation, led by young people struggling to remain in their urban neighborhoods and academics who pointed out that many cities around the world, including London, New York and Paris, had successfully implemented programs to regulate rents and build affordable housing units. In both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the issue played a key role in the elections for mayor in late 2008.

Initially, officials inside the Tel Aviv Municipality approached the idea with trepidation. Mayor Ron Huldai was quoted more than once criticizing the idea in the media.

Dr. Emily Silverman recalls that the project, ironically, grew out of an attempt by the municipality to justify not taking action. It was back in 2007, Silverman recalls, that calls from local politicians calling on the city to explore the issue of affordable housing were growing louder. In response, City Engineer Chezi Berkowitz asked the municipal planning team to draw up a professional opinion explaining why the municipality did not have the capability to create such a project, based on two previous assessments of the issue written by economists.

However, when members of the planning team consulted with Silverman, a known expert on the subject, she managed to convince them that it was possible. The planners in turn convinced the City Engineer, and thus the idea for the commission was born.

*****

Another irony is this: even if the plan is eventually approved and implemented, it probably won’t lower rents across the board. A certain number of people, it’s unclear how many, would be eligible for cheaper apartments, but the steps that the municipality is currently considering are not expected to have a significant impact on the greater housing market.

Gil Gan-Mor is a human rights lawyer at The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and a leading advocate of housing rights and affordable housing. ACRI is part of the Coalition for the Advancement of Affordable Housing in Israel, which also includes The Association for Distributive Justice, Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights, and research institutes from Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa and the Technion. The coalition has started a Hebrew-language blog as a platform for public discussion on the issue and is working on passing an affordable housing law in the Knesset.

Gan-Mor says he supports the move to create affordable housing in Tel Aviv, but believes that the city’s plan in its current form leaves much to be desired.

“The municipality could decide to set up a rent control mechanism that would allow landlords to raise rents incrementally, according to a set percentage every year,” says Gan-Mor. “Today, landlords take advantage of a lack of supply to hike rents substantially, and if a renter doesn’t agree to this, he simply has to look elsewhere.”

Dr. Emily Silverman admits that building a large number of affordable apartments for a specific group would probably not have a significant effect on the general rental market. “Affordable housing programs don’t usually result in a general lowering of prices, except for the target population,” she says.

However, she adds, speeding up construction of already-approved plans in order to increase supply (which was recommended by the commission) could theoretically lower rents across the city – it’s a matter of supply and demand. Silverman agrees that rent control mechanisms could also potentially benefit all of the city’s renters.

The problem, says Gan-Mor, is that regulatory tools, like rent control, which have been implemented successfully in many places in the world are not even being discussed – at least not according to the information that the municipality has made public. Says Gan-Mor: “The city’s method of releasing information through periodic press releases does not allow for a proper public discussion of the issue.”

He also notes that the municipality is considering making army service a condition for eligibility for affordable housing, a move which would effectively exclude the Arab community of Jaffa from the program.

Questions have also been raised regarding the project’s choice of target population. The commission’s mandate was to find affordable solutions for households with monthly incomes of between NIS 12,000-13,000. Last year, Dr. Emily Silverman described the target group to Metro as “moderate-income, socially-mobile young professionals.” For this population, the city would offer rents of around NIS 2,800.

However, as Gan-Mor points out, the plan provides no solutions for low-income residents of the city.

The municipality admits that this is the case, but argues that it does not have the resources to provide housing assistance to a low-income population. The Tel Aviv Municipality told Metro: “Public housing, everywhere in the world and in Israel as well, is the responsibility of the government, and not the responsibility of the local authority. The municipality does not have the capability to supply public housing like the government, without any means or appropriate tools. Therefore, the recommendations define the target population as an intermediate population, which is able to pay, but unable to afford to live in the city at market rates.”

To Gan-Mor, the city’s refusal to provide housing aid to low-income families is unacceptable. “The municipality’s plan states that it trusts the government to provide housing assistance for people in the lower income deciles,” he says. “The problem with this is that the State has scaled back its public housing programs in recent years. The waiting period for public housing in the center of the country can be over ten years, and rental subsidies provided by the government are way too low to cover rents in the Tel Aviv area. The inevitable result is that people with low incomes are forced to leave the city.”

*****

Not everyone, of course, is convinced of the merits of affordable housing. A number of conservative economists have publicly expressed their doubts about the plan. One of them is Dr. Yair Duchin, a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who made headlines last month when he called the idea of providing affordable housing in Tel Aviv “idiotic.”

Though he admits that, from a social perspective, there may be a problem in Tel Aviv’s housing market, Duchin says he prefers to look at the larger picture. The country’s periphery, he says, is emptying out. “Youth from all over Israel, including graduates of universities in Haifa and Be’er Sheva, are streaming to Tel Aviv. Affordable housing will only serve to attract more of them.”

“Of course the mayor of Tel Aviv wants to attract a young, strong, productive population. That’s perfectly legitimate. But there are also national goals. I think that the country’s limited resources should not be invested in those who want to live in central Tel Aviv.”

As for Tel Aviv’s young residents, Duchin suggests that they move out of the city, to Bat Yam, Holon or Petach Tikvah. If enough people move out of central Tel Aviv, he says, perhaps market forces alone will be enough to lower rents.

*****

For Prof. Noah Efron, a city council member from opposition party City for All (Ir Likulanu), it’s pretty clear why the plan is not going anywhere. “Nobody within the municipality wants to advance it, so it’s simply not being advanced,” he says.

While Efron thinks that the commission’s plan is insufficient, he admits that “it’s excellent for what it is,” and should be implemented right away. Noting that City for All has a much more extensive affordable housing plan of its own, Efron says he believes that the municipality’s plan has the potential to establish a number of important principles.

“The implementation of mixed housing, building for the rental market, dealing with apartment sizes – talking about these issues, even on a small scale, can begin to change the discussion about housing in the city and create important precedents, making it easier for the city’s planning committees to insist that developers build projects that are mixed, and not just for the rich or super-rich.”

To a limited extent, that has already begun to happen. Even without an official stamp on the commission’s plan, city planning committees have begun to use the momentum created by its work to require developers to integrate affordable housing units into new projects.

This is what happened, for example, in discussions regarding the former site of the city’s wholesale market. An enormous real estate project is planned for the 60-dunam site, which sits partially on city-owned land near Carlibach Street. When representatives from several local political parties insisted that the plan include an element of affordable housing, the developer agreed to add 60 small, affordable rental units.

“In the scheme of things,” says Efron, “it’s a drop in the bucket. But it’s also a sign that, if we continue to be vigilant in the municipal committees and bring enough public pressure to bear, we can begin this process, eventually making it into the norm. The municipality has publicly committed to doing this, now we have to push it to honor its commitments.”

This article was originally published in The Jerusalem Post’s “Metro” supplement on Sept. 11, 2009 (click here for a pdf of the original print version).

This month, Tel Aviv’s derelict Old Central Bus Station became history. The much-maligned New Central Bus Station may soon follow suit, while a New New Central Bus Station is still in the planning stages.

“I used to get off at the old bus station, and to me it was like another country…” goes the Tipex song (in free translation). Above: Tel Aviv’s Old Central Bus Station demolished. (Photo by Moran Beth Halachmi, via Flickr.)

It sometimes seems to me that there must be some kind of curse on all things transportation in Tel Aviv. The traffic jams are unbearable, the drivers obnoxious, the buses lousy and the bus station even lousier. And who even knows if the light rail/subway project will ever actually happen…

Recently, however, things have started to happen in Neveh Sha’anan, where the old and new bus stations lie on opposite sides of a busy pedestrian mall.

The old bus station, more or less abandoned (except for a couple of businesses and perhaps the occasional junkie) since the early 1990’s, was demolished last week. After the Egged bus company finally vacated the place, the city decided to redevelop it. The first new tenant will be the Minshar art school, which will build a brand new building on the site. Other educational institutions are expected to follow, and in the meantime the rest of the plot will be transformed into a temporary park.

Meanwhile, local newspapers have been abuzz lately with rumors that the New Central Bus Station, an almost universally detested structure credited with destroying the entire surrounding neighborhood, may soon be vacated as well. Billed as the world’s biggest bus station, the place has never functioned well, is almost impossible to navigate and much of its commercial space sits unused.

Bus companies Egged and Dan are reportedly fed up with the place, and are looking to transfer their activities elsewhere when their contracts with the station’s owners expire in a couple of years. The Ministry of Transportation and the Tel Aviv Municipality are said to support the move, according to local newspaper Ha’ir.

According to Ha’ir, a new transportation terminal is likely to be built at the Holon Interchange, south of the existing station. The current bus station, recently aquired by new owners, may be reincarnated as something different altogether, possibly a high-rise complex. Or, the new owners might be able to convince the bus companies to stay put. In either case, any change in the status quo is likely to take years to pan out.

But if a New New Central Bus Station is in the cards for Tel Aviv, let’s hope that this time they do it right.

Originally published at GreenProphet.com on August 9 2009.

Photo by Oren Ziv, courtesy of Activestills.org.

This past weekend, a couple friends and I helped four Sudanese families move out of Tel Aviv. We rented a van (which of course broke down mid-move), loaded up their possessions along with some furniture donated by several kind people, and set off for Nazareth, Hadera and Ashdod – distant cities where they hope to set up new homes. The families, refugees from conflict zones in Darfur and South Sudan, were grateful to us for our help. Leaving Tel Aviv was not their choice – as of the beginning of July, they are no longer allowed to live and work in Israel’s largest urban area.

Refugees everywhere tend to concentrate themselves on the fringes of big cities. Here, too, most of African refugee community, which began arriving here after Egyptian police attacked and killed Sudanese refugees protesting in Cairo in late 2005, took up residence in Tel Aviv’s poorer southern neighborhoods.

A particularly large wave of refugees arrived in Tel Aviv during the winter of 2008. During that time, it became common to see people sleeping outside in public parks or cramped into overcrowded shelters. Noticing the obvious distress of these newcomers to our city, several friends and I set up a voluntary organization to provide them with food, English and Hebrew lessons, children’s activities and whatever other services we could muster on a shoestring budget and with the help of a handful of volunteers.

Around the same time, the Israeli government, which also caught wind of what was going on, decided to restrict African asylum seekers from living inside Greater Tel Aviv (illegally, according to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees). This policy still applies to the vast majority of the almost 20,000 refugees from Sudan, Eritrea and other countries currently living in Israel.

Apparently, the policy stemmed from a combination of NIMBY-ism on the part of the Tel Aviv Municipality, economic nationalism (“they are taking jobs from Israelis”) and the government’s fear that, if treated well, the refugees would tell all of their friends and family to come to Israel as well. The policy, called Hadera-Gedera after the two cities that delineate the edges of Metropolitan Tel Aviv, recalls (to my mind, anyway) the Pale of Settlement, Imperial Russia’s attempt to physically remove the Jews from the mainstream of Russian society.

While a small minority have been officially recognized as refugees, and thus granted ID cards and the right to work legally, the rest have been labeled by government officials as “refugee work immigrants” and “illegal infiltrators from enemy countries,” and told the leave the center of the country.

Until recently, the Hadera-Gedera policy was only loosely enforced. However, July 1st marked the inauguration of a new unit at the Population Administration, called “Oz,” charged with arresting and expelling all “illegal” foreign workers and asylum seekers. Whether the new unit’s appearance has anything to do with the rise of the nationalist far-right in Israel is unclear.

In any case, since then they have been conducting daily manhunts on the streets of Tel Aviv, targeting anyone with a foreign appearance. After they arrested hundreds of African refugees and ordered them to leave the city, the refugees got the message, and thus began the latest in a long series of displacements that this community has suffered.

The tragedy of it all is that the refugee community was finally beginning to find some stability and normalcy in Tel Aviv. Here, their kids studied in Israeli schools, they found jobs, free health clinics and aid organizations. How they will find jobs to pay their rents outside of the center of the country, where work is scarce, I do not know.

Needless to say, this is a community of sharp, resilient and warm people fleeing unimaginable circumstances. Many, many people in Tel Aviv reacted to their arrival with an outpouring of hospitality and generosity. There are more than a few people in Tel Aviv for whom the decision to expel them from the city represents the crossing of a red line – and it takes a lot for people to really take up such a cause in a country where every week seems to bring some new scandal or political upheaval.

The government, however, has hardened its heart toward these uninvited guests. Passed around like a human hot potato, the African community has not always been made to feel welcome. Almost every refugee that I have met spent the first several months of his or her stay in an Israeli prison, and, for most, the only official document they carry is still their “conditional release” from incarceration.

The government is promoting a new law which would criminalize the refugees, threatening them and those that assist them with long jail terms. According to the bill, my friends and I, by choosing to spend our weekend helping refugee families move, could find ourselves sentenced to 20 years in jail.

For the sake of comparison, Avraham Hirshson, Israel’s former Finance Minister who was found guilty of stealing millions from a workers’ federation, got only five and a half years in jail.

Like most Israelis, I come from a family that was forced to flee its home more than once. Almost everyone in this land, whether Jew or Palestinian, knows what it is like to be a refugee. If anyone should have compassion for these unfortunate people, it is us.

Originally published at Mondoweiss on July 26 2009.

A dramatic plan that would change the face of Tel Aviv is likely to be approved, despite the adamant opposition of residents and charges of sloppy and unprofessional planning.

The future of Neveh Tzedek? A map, prepared by the residents’ committee, illustrating future construction plans. (Image via: www.nevetzedek.org)

The Tel Aviv City Council held a meeting yesterday to discuss a handful of building plans that, if approved, would effectively transform some of the city’s most historic areas beyond recognition.

The discussion, which some council members described as “fateful” and “dramatic,” drew a large number of city residents eager to have a say in the planning of their neighborhoods. The meeting, however, was conducted in a manner that seemed designed to exclude the public, and avoided discussion of the plans’ repercussions for the city’s future development.

The plans under discussion included the widening of Yitzchak Elchanan Street, north of Neveh Tzedek, as well as the new Mesila Highway, south of the neighborhood. Both are plans for new traffic arteries, lined with skyscrapers, that together would form a ring of traffic and tall buildings around Neveh Tzedek, one of Tel Aviv’s oldest and most charming (and richest) neighborhoods.

When connected with the Shlavim Highway, another skyscraper-lined expressway being promoted by the city, the roads would create a major new traffic artery, channelling cars from the Holon Interchange south of the city to the office towers along Rothschild Boulevard.

The plans were drawn up after a higher planning committee ordered Tel Aviv to formulate a comprehensive planning document, instead of haphazardly promoting a collection of individual building plans and roads, as it had done until then. The city recently presented and approved the comprehensive plan, resulting in several appeals being submitted by city council members.

The day got off to a bad start when dozens of residents were refused entry into the meeting. Instead of being held in the usual city council hall, the discussion took place in a small meeting room on the 12th floor of the municipality building, with officials claiming there was not enough space to let everyone in. The residents did eventually manage to get in, though, and made sure to make their presence felt, jeering the plan’s proponents and applauding when some council members spoke out against them.

Left: Dozens of angry residents were initially denied entry into the meeting, on the grounds that there was not enough space for the public.

Opponents of the plans claimed that they would necessitate the destruction of two schools near Neveh Tzedek, form a “separation wall” of concrete buildings between south neighborhoods instead of connecting them and ruin the character of neighborhoods slated for preservation. The Mesila Highway, a three-story right-of-way (a subway line and an underground highway below street level, with a park on surface) was criticized as unrealistic and unlikely to ever actually take shape.

The plans themselves, which were neither printed nor submitted for public review, were only presented halfway through the meeting, on the request of a council member. Several neighborhood representatives criticized them as being superficial, unprofessional and hastily put together.

The documents contained no serious discussion, for example, of the effects that the tall buildings would have on breezes, or of where their shadows would fall. Apparently, no one thought about where all of the new residents’ children would go to school, or what effect their cars would have on the already traffic-clogged area. Some council members pointed out that the new residential buildings, in all likelihood populated largely by foreign residents who live outside Tel Aviv, would add little to the fabric of life in that part of the city.

After all sides’ claims were presented, Deputy Mayor Doron Sapir, who chaired the meeting, declared a closed discussion and asked all observers to leave.

Only after the meeting ended did it become clear that someone had actually drawn up an alternative plan, in which the thousands of housing units proposed by the city would be built in low-rise buildings instead of skyscrapers. No one had mentioned this alternative during the meeting itself, although neighborhood representatives had expressed their clear preference for such an alternative.

In the end, the plans will probably be approved. That’s the way it is in Tel Aviv – Mayor Ron Huldai demands strict discipline from members of his coalition, and he knows that he can easily find the votes to pass any proposal he likes. The fact that so many major new roads (accompanied, of course, by parking lots, giant intersections, gas stations, etc.) are being approved in southern Tel Aviv speaks volumes about the city’s planning policy. Increasingly, the mythical light rail, which is still not even close to implementation, is looking like a smoke screen.

The bottom line is that the city backed itself into a corner. By encouraging developers to buy up large plots of land in an area of the city that it thought no one cared about, city planners found themselves with a series of plans for tall buildings in an area where no other building rises above four stories. By promoting skyscrapers around Neveh Tzedek, the city found itself antagonizing a hornet’s nest of wealthy and well-connected citizens. And by excluding opinionated residents from most of the planning process, the city found itself with an uncompromising front of opposition that no longer believes a single word uttered by its officials.

While the future of the area remains unclear, there is still reason for optimism. Politicians are slow learners, preferring a bitter fight to the end over an agreed-upon compromise. However, a line in the sand has been drawn by residents and activists in the city, and a new kind of politics is slowly taking shape in the city.

Originally published at GreenProphet.com.