Globes, Guy Nardi, 02.06.2020

The 2019 Annual Building Licensing Report released by the Planning Administration last month boasts a supply of 60,773 new housing units, up from 46,527 in 2018. The big news, according to the report, is that the overall uptake from applying for a building permit to issuing the permit was an average of 7.3 months for permits without relief and 11.1 months for permits that include relief. Seemingly, promoting a building plan in the State of Israel is a simple and fast thing.

The housing headquarters report, published before it was dismantled, also boasted that Israel has made a significant leap in shortening licensing procedures, rising from the 121st place in the world five years ago to 35th in the world today. The housing headquarters data is similar, which now requires only 268 days (about nine months) to obtain a building permit, and even less than that in a cost-per-project project.

Planning Director General, Dalit Silver / Photo: Inbal Marmari

At the housing headquarters, they emphasized that the time needed to obtain a permit should be further reduced, for example, by eliminating the easing as planned by the CEO of the Planning Administration, Dalit Silber.

However, since this data has been published, we have received many inquiries from entrepreneurs and architects who claim that the statistics in this case produce a misrepresentation, and that in reality, building a building permit, for any structure, takes much longer - not months but years.

"In some municipalities the situation is particularly bleak"

Madeleine monitors every permit application that is filed in Israel from the moment the application is submitted to the moment of approval, and thus it has accurate data on the duration of the approval. Ethan Singer Madeleine CEO: "According to our data, from the time the application is submitted, the average time to issue a building permit is only increasing over the years, and the national average today is just over three years. Some municipalities present an even more bleak picture, with an average time of four years, including major cities such as Tel Aviv, Holon, Herzliya and Ramat Gan. In fact, we see that any reform undertaken in the field has only complicated the issue and extended the time for issuing the permit. "

Ethan Singer, CEO of Madeleine Israel / Photo: Dror Katz

Ronen Rosenthal, an urban economist, real estate appraiser and real estate researcher, says the problem is mostly methodological. Of permits, excavation and deepening permits and a request to cancel a window in the home - and a building permit for a residential tower with 100 housing units, and found that if only building permits were counted, the result would be completely different (see frame).

Adv. Anat Biran says that in her experience, four years for the purpose of issuing a building permit are commonplace. You can spend incessant ping-pong in front of the system until you get the permit. Nobody counts this time. Lots of requests that were supposed to be approved under conditions, denied, and then it all starts from the beginning. You spend years in the process of dialogue with the team only to approve the design plan. When you come to get the permit already, you are told a net time, when all that has been done for it is long years of work and are part of the licensing process. Nothing of what you went through was measured. "

Dana Vishkin / Photo: Private

We were alerted by the Planning Administration about two years ago that the characterization of the system does not allow them to keep track of history, and although they also have the reports of truth data transmitted by the committees outside the system, they choose to ignore it. Success in failed reform, teasing the public, and seriously hurting the entire industry, including the economy. " Architect Dana Vishkin, founder of the Facebook group "Insane Licensing": "Architects are afraid to talk about the issue openly, they may appear insufficiently professional or insufficiently linked, and damage their reputation. But anyone working in the industry realizes that the data published by the Planning Administration is entirely imagined, And there has been tremendous aggravation in recent years.

Response: "Obviously this is average time"

The Planning Administration said in response: "These are again spiteful claims that are inaccurate to say the least. The Planning Administration is working hard to improve and promote the licensing procedures and this is evident in the clear data in the report, while there are factors that continue with irrelevant mantras.
" The average length of time to issue a permit - from the stage of receipt of an application to the stage of issuing a building permit. Contrary to the claims, the data does not include any changes in engineer authority. They do include all other types of permits, as part of a full licensing and easement licensing route. Obviously, there are more complex permits that take more time and permits that require short treatment time and therefore it is average treatment time. "

Urban Renewal: "Need to Measure Different"

As far as permits for evacuation of construction or TAMA 38 are concerned, it is difficult to even know the situation, but according to the Municipal Renewal Authority there is actually a deterioration over time for a permit.

The authority, which operates as a unit in the Ministry of Construction and Housing, issued an extensive report in 2018, which states, among other things, that "a large part of the local authorities do not enter the project data well when the building permit is granted, and therefore there are significant delays in data collection, improvement and analysis. Permit data for computer systems is included, so this data does not exist and cannot be located. "

In the 2019 Urban Renewal Authority's report, published two weeks ago, the issue received special reference: "The authority collects data from the building permit application up to the population, and thus it is possible to examine the duration of the overall implementation process for TAMA 38 projects. The data before us indicates that the permit process, Lasted less than a year, lasted for more than three years and lasted for more than three years, and its persistence impairs the efficiency of the process. "The
PA noted that" this figure corresponds to the length of time that a building permit is issued in general, even compared to projects under new construction. "

Guri Nadler, head of the Planning Division of the Government for Urban Renewal, explains that the count of the Planning Administration differs from the usual in the area of ​​urban renewal: Usually, from the beginning of the application to receiving the permit, more than one permit is passed - because there are schedules and if the permit does not meet the threshold conditions, it is canceled and a new permit begins. As far as the developer and the tenants are concerned, it is the same process - it is not interesting for them to close one permit or open another.

"We are looking at a project from the day they began to handle the construction permit issue until the day it was received, and getting the permit for TAMA 38 projects is only getting longer. The real question is how long does it take from the planning action to start building. And that's a long time. "

When only "real" permits are counted - the time is much longer

In light of the fact that the Planning Administration data constitute an average of all types of permits, including small and technical ones, urban economist Ronnie Rosenthal decided to offer an alternative test, and conducted a random examination of the last ten building permits in five different cities. It then checked the average time from the time the application was submitted to the moment the permit was issued. Rosenthal checked how long it took to take out the original permit from the moment the application was issued until the actual permit was issued - without calculating the time it took to request the information file, pre-rolling (prerequisites for planning), or early withdrawals.

Rosenthal's analysis includes only permit applications that include more than 2 additional units (to avoid including applications for land-linked homes), and ignoring interim procedures such as renaming submitting that it is the same application, etc.

The results are interesting. An examination of the last ten permits approved in the city of Herzliya reveals that the average time to issue building permits is only five months. But with the exception of one building permit out of ten, all others are building permits to renew a previous permit, and / or change the permit name. When considering what the real average duration for approval of these projects is, the process has taken no less than 27 months - two years and three months.

The Ramat Gan test revealed that of the ten projects examined, only half were for saturated construction and the rest for ground-mounted. The average time to issue a permit is 29 months, however, when the irrelevant permits are "deducted", the permit is extended to about 36 months. Reducing land-linked housing projects takes up to 46 months, and some projects also 64 months - more than five years.

How long it takes to get a building permit

The test in Givatayim reveals that out of ten applications for only one permit is for saturated construction. The remainder are requests for exit rooms on the roof, extra lift, window cancellation and ground-mounted. The average length of permit issuance in Givatayim, which stands at 17.5 months, was therefore mainly due to small and marginal permits.

The examination of the last ten permits in the city of Nahariya reveals that the average time of obtaining the permit is 2.8 months. Sounds brief, until a look at the whitelist reveals that these are mainly excavation permits, permits for the construction of an electricity room, a transformation room, a consolidation of apartments and alterations, and an additional two units for the building. , Which was 4.6 years from the date of the original application until its final approval.

The test in the city of Beersheba shows that the average time for a permit, according to the last ten permits, is 4.3 months. However, most permits are permits for land-based changes.

​​​​​​​Ronen Rosenthal / Photo: PR

Ronen Rosenthal: "I have no pretense of presenting a study that has statistical reliability, it is a test of ten random permits.