Gillad ROSEN, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Israel’s rental housing market is on the verge of a new era. Throughout the country’s history, owner-occupied dwellings have been the preferred and unchallenged housing product. In contrast, rental units have been offered mainly by individual investors (i.e., mom and pop landlords) and through state-owned public housing to a lesser extent. A long-term rental housing market (an institutional rental market) has emerged in the past few years, primarily through Build-to-Rent (BtR) mechanisms. However, the institutional rental market investors conists of less than 1% of the rental housing market in Israel.
This paper investigates the role of the central state in launching and catalyzing the BtR market in Israel, theoretically engaging with the growing literature on rental housing financialization. The trigger for the mergence of the BtR market is escalating housing prices and public outcry. It is an exploratory paper, that delves intp this uncharted territory through the analysis of documents (legislation, housing policy papers, planning protocols, newspapers, and corporate reports). We argue that Israeli neoliberal-minded governments have been experimenting with various financial and planning tools (i.e., land, development, and financial incentives) to stimulate the emergence of the BtR market. These experiments, represent a range of interventions and seek to address impediments to the formation and function of the housing market.
Mots clés : Rental housing|Build-to-Rent|financialization
A103135IC